The month of May is coming to a blistering hot end. Across Europe, new high temperature records are being set and unpredictability is very literally in the air as people wonder how they will adapt to these rapid meteorological changes long term.

In the world of IT, technology may be evolving equally rapidly but are the takes from the AI faithful still that hot or is the discourse increasingly predictable?

Plus, a dapper ransomware outfit is gaining infamy as one of the most active and successful cyber gangs in the world.

Highlights

"It's a fairly tepid take. The idea that the professions that will survive the AI revolutions are the ones that need to physically be done – trades, as we say in British English. Also ... things like hairdressers, carers, nurses, doctors, whatnot, they're all supposed to be kind of fairly safe professions as well."

"You wouldn't take a section of your employees and give them access to everything, or leave them to run consistently and hope that everything works out, because it would just end up in failure with data privacy issues [and] all kinds of problems. What Gartner's report said was that if you fail to distinguish between an agent's ability to act and the scope of access it's granted, then it will come down to some kind of a failure, and these are often not noticed until the failure happens."

"[The Gentlemen] feel kind of somewhat nomadic, somewhat just able to turn their attention to wherever is going to be the most lucrative spot for them ... [and] they are now responsible for 10% of all cyber crime."

Footnotes

• Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says these professions will be the big winners of the generative AI boom
• Are AI tools making us less intelligent?
• 'One-size-fits-all' agent governance sets enterprises up to fail
• “Now we have, for the very first time, useful AI” – Jensen Huang and Michael Dell talk up the power of agentic AI at Dell Technologies World 2026
• New ransomware threat group, The Gentlemen, has become one of the most active ransomware operators, accounting for 10% of all attacks
• Uber Says Its AI Costs Just Aren't Worth It

The British Business Bank has pledged up to £50 million to Longwall Venture Partners' latest fund to support early-stage deep tech companies.

Founded in 2008, Longwall Ventures is a UK early-stage venture capital firm that's so far invested in more than 50 deep tech companies, ranging from medical devices to defence and aerospace applications.

"The UK's strong research base across academia and industry has created a rich seam of opportunities to turn ground-breaking science into valuable businesses, but these businesses often struggle to raise long-term capital to support them on their journey to commercialization," said David Denny, managing partner at Longwall Venture Partners.

"We are excited to find the next crop of deeptech investments for our new fund."

This new British Business Bank commitment to the Longwall 4 fund follows similar investments in Longwall's Oxford Technology ECF LP in 2008, Longwall Ventures ECF LP in 2012, and Longwall Ventures 3 ECF LP in 2017.

The first of these was one of the first investors in OrganOx, which was sold in 2025 to Terumo Corporation for more than $1.5 billion – making it the biggest acquisition of an Oxford University spinout to date, and one of the UK's biggest-ever medtech exit deals. It delivered a 19.2x return for investors, including the Bank.

And with five exits so far in OTECF, the fund's private LPs have received a return of six times on their original investment.

"British Business Bank's investment into Longwall Venture's new fund will provide a major boost to startups across key growth sectors and is a shot in the arm for the UK's thriving technology sector," said business secretary Peter Kyle.

"This news demonstrates how this government is using our Modern Industrial Strategy to deliver long-term growth and opportunities that support skilled jobs and raises living standards across the UK."

The British Business Bank is the largest investor in UK venture and venture growth capital funds. Its Enterprise Capital Funds program aims to increase the supply of equity capital to early-stage UK companies with long-term growth potential, and reduce the barriers to entry for fund managers looking to operate in the VC market. It's backed 54 funds to date, representing around £2.7 billion of finance.

"The Enterprise Capital Funds programme plays a crucial role in helping early-stage funds raise capital with a cornerstone investment, increasing the amount of scale-up finance available for high-growth early-stage companies," said Mark Sims, managing director, head of development equity funds at the British Business Bank.

"With businesses like OrganOx already pushing the boundaries of what's possible, our continued partnership with Longwall Ventures will help uncover the next generation of breakthrough technologies and UK success stories."

Working with the same strategy as its previous funds, Longwall 4 will continue to target UK-based startup and early-stage science and engineering deeptech companies across a range of sectors, including the Industrial Strategy sectors of Advanced Manufacturing, Clean Energy, Defence, and Life Sciences.

Fund 4 is targeting investing between £500,000 and £2 million into around 15 companies, with a 'significant' amount of capital reserved for follow on investments. It has already raised £86.2 million, and is targeting £100 million at close.

Barclays Eagle Labs has produced a report profiling the UK's top 100 AI scale-ups, with advice for founders who'd like to emulate them.

"The UK has no shortage of world-class AI innovation – the real challenge is helping the strongest businesses turn that innovation into long-term, scalable growth," said Abdul Qureshi, head of Barclays Business Banking.

"This report shines a light on the companies already doing that, while also highlighting the ecosystem support needed to help more founders make the leap from promising startups to global scale-up success stories."

The firm's The Ones to Watch: AI 100 Report found that investment reached a record £8.3 billion in 2025, the highest ever recorded value. At the end of the year, said the researchers, the UK AI ecosystem was in its strongest position ever, with established companies securing record deals and the largest-ever pipeline of first-time fundraisers.

The researchers concluded that London is still the UK's main AI hub, home to 74.1% of the UK's AI fintech companies. However, regional clusters are maturing rapidly.

The North West, for example, has seen the number of active AI companies growing 2.41 times since 2019 – more than London's 2.13. The AI companies here are working mainly in the UK's modern industrial strategy (IS8) professional and business services industry.

In Scotland, meanwhile, AI companies have grown 1.81 times since 2019, with professional and business services again a leading sector, and the Midlands is building on its automotive and engineering base.

With 59 SaaS companies appearing in the list, this sector, along with data provision and analysis, is roughly three times the size of the next-largest AI industry, robotics and automation.

The report has advice for founders wanting to scale up. At accountancy firm Cooper Parry (CP), Tom Watts and Asif Ahmed advise founders to think about the enterprise sales cycle early, keep an eye on international opportunities from the outset, and play to the UK's strengths.

Meanwhile, Mike Jones, founder of talent acquisition firm Emerald, advises getting the early hires right, keeping talent density high, and being deliberate about culture from day one. "Your early hires set the bar as you scale," he said.

And Preetham Peddanagari, a partner and UK & Ireland chief technology officer at EY, said founders should build for pain, not for applause. "The best AI companies are not the ones with the cleverest demos. They're the ones solving expensive, repetitive, high-friction problems inside real workflows," he said. They should design for trust from day one, and think internationally earlier than feels comfortable.

"The hundred companies in this report are not experimenting with a novel technology. They are building what comes next, and capital is following for rational reasons," said Mark Zanoli, Barclays' global chairman of investment banking.

"AI is already moving from experimentation into practical adoption, and this report provides an evidence-based view of where value is forming."

Alongside the AI 100 report, Barclays Eagle Labs has also announced the launch of the Scale up Consortium, a collaboration uniting founders with industry leaders to help high-growth UK companies scale.

For many workplaces around the world, 2025 was a year of dramatic change. More and more companies rushed to embed AI agents into their business processes.

Concerns that these new colleagues will eventually lead to AI eliminating roles from the workforce grew louder, while big tech giants including Amazon, Meta and Microsoft all cited AI as a reason for cutting jobs. In total, AI was the reason for 54,694 layoffs from January through November, per consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

In light of this, ITPro asked members of the tech community which trends they thought would most change the workplace in the year ahead.

Streamlining tech stacks to improve the hiring process

The potential of AI agents covers almost every business function, including recruiting and hiring. Anastasia Pshegodskaya. global director of talent acquisition at global HR solution provider Remote, describes its potential as “exciting, but frankly quite messy”.

The problem is that AI has transformed hiring at a faster pace than the average HR system can handle. As a result, roughly a third of HR leaders are finding that they’re having to work with several disconnected tools, according to Remote’s 2025 Global Workplace report, which surveyed 3,650 leaders.

“Two-thirds of HR tasks could be automated by AI within a year or two. But to make this happen, HR departments must sort out the tangle of point solutions in their tech infrastructure,” stresses Pshegodskaya. “Right now, they’re having to juggle three, four or even five separate systems just to move a candidate from application to offer.”

This year, and 2027, will be less about adding new AI tools to tech stacks and more about consolidating what they already have, she adds. The focus will be on setting guardrails for fairness and compliance, “so that AI can support good hiring decisions rather than simply speeding up bad ones”.

Offering ‘emotional salaries’ to attract and retain talent

As competition for talent hots up, Matt Monette, head of UK and Ireland at global compliance and payroll solution provider Deel, expects that companies will need to go beyond offering attractive pay packets this year.

Hiring budgets will be tight in 2026, with fewer guaranteed pay rises. Companies competing for the best talent will need to offer “emotional salaries” that lean on perks that support employees’ personal well-being, such as flexibility.

Such workplace perks aren’t new, of course. However, with employees growing increasingly concerned that they may be replaced by AI, they’ll need to be able to trust their employers. “Offering these perks will be the new currency,” Monette adds.

On top of this, he sees resilience sprints becoming mainstream, particularly in the UK, as teams grapple with disruption caused by economic turbulence.

“Short, focused check-ins that discuss losses, lessons and small wins help to normalize vulnerability and learning in the face of economic challenges. Used well, they can build the kind of resilience that helps employees avoid the risk of burning out.”

Providing training customized to AI tools

Simon Pettit is the area vice president for the UK and Ireland at agentic automation specialist UiPath. He’s in no doubt that AI is going to play a big role in the workplace this year. “But how it’s viewed culturally hinges on whether employee upskilling and training initiatives are prioritized,” he says.

Though AI usage is on the rise – with Gallup recording 40% of US employees now using the technology – business leaders remain worried about AI skills shortages.

“Hiring external, specialist AI talent is important. However, a lack of AI training initiatives can dent user confidence and prevent seamless, business-wide adoption,” Pettit warns.

As well as training that is customized to the AI tools that are being embedded in business processes, his advice is to conduct short pilot phases to build employee buy-in.

“These phases provide the opportunity for employees to test the tool and provide feedback in a lower-pressure environment before wider roll out,” he adds. “Adoption ends up being a collective process rather than a top-down enforcement.”

Balancing AI with human skills

There’s no question of whether companies will continue to adopt AI in 2026. Instead, the year ahead “will be shaped by how confidently enterprises can balance technology with humanity,” declares Wendy Swash, COO at global outsourced answering service Moneypenny.

The real opportunity, she adds, will be in “using AI to amplify human strengths, freeing people to do the things that the technology can’t: show judgement, build relationships, be creative.”

Examples of this include flexible working supported by secure, well-designed systems, continuous feedback loops, and learning platforms that enable employees to develop skills fluidly as their roles evolve.

“Ultimately, 2026 is going to reward the enterprises that view IT not just as infrastructure, but as a cultural enabler supporting belonging, adaptability and purposeful work,” concludes Swash.

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In this video recording of our Built Environment Summit, our host Yalda Gerami, Regional Vice President at Salesforce, takes you through the latest trends and opportunities in data and AI, and provides insights into what it can do to empower your business and deliver connected client experiences, drive productivity and efficiency, and accelerate profitable growth.

We also introduce Agentforce, Salesforce’s AI-powered autonomous agent, built to enhance client experiences and employee productivity.

In our demo, we showcase how you can build an agent in a matter of minutes with one of our customers, Cala Homes. They take to the stage to create their very own agent and see it live in action!

The tech sector is navigating an increasingly complex landscape of evolving business models, changing regulations, and shifting user and customer expectations.

While there’s challenge in change, there’s opportunity, too. Across the sector—from social platforms and software vendors to consumer electronics and professional services firms—the opportunities for growth are vast.

Download this eBook to learn more!

It’s an understatement to say that the UK’s national health system was exposed for its inadequacy during the COVID-19 pandemic. A decade-long policy of government budget cuts left it ill-equipped to supply enough beds for patients, staff and medical equipment for hospitals, and investment in research to offer guidance on long COVID – as well as showing flagrant inequality in its care provision across diverse groups.

Still, in 2019, the Open Data Institute (ODI), as part of a consumer survey, revealed that “59% [of UK respondents trusted] the NHS and healthcare providers to use personal data ethically – the only type of organisation trusted by over half of those surveyed.” Despite the inadequacies, the general public estimated healthcare professionals were trustworthy.

Unfortunately, despite renewed efforts and the rollout of a national Data Strategy, in time, the financial burden of constant budget cuts has caught up with many cash-strapped local authorities and agencies. Research from ENISA has shown that many healthcare organizations still employ lackluster defences to counter growing threats. Its analysis of the healthcare industry in the EU found that only 27% of organisations have a dedicated ransomware defense program.

The combination of increased vulnerability caused by lagging IT infrastructure, slow adoption and rollout of new technology, and lack of security awareness from non-IT staff is exacerbated by the sheer economic worth of patient data and the cutting-edge tools that cybercriminals are now harnessing.

In this environment, the role played by cyber-technology providers is crucial. A supplier’s ability to think beyond the mere technological scope of – or solution to – a problem will result in a stronger and longer-lasting infrastructure and flexibility when attacks surge, instead of a one-time fix. Referencing AI technologies in healthcare, Tim Skinner says that "the narrow focus on technology can reduce the efficiency of a project and prevent those involved from getting to the end goal.” For a cybersecurity provider, this means developing cutting-edge knowledge that can persuade key enterprise stakeholders that their wider IT ecosystem is not only highly secure but also creative enough to sustain the most ingenious strikes, whether through prevention or recovery.

How do enterprise tech providers assuage decision-makers? How do they go about convincing them that they are the right partners for the job, and by extension, the future?

According to ITPro’s Future Focus Report 2025, key considerations include:

• Being reliable and transparent
• Sharing goals and ambitions
• Displaying advisory capabilities
• Being flexible and attentive
• Being a team player

The report also offers insight into the approach that IT decision-makers take when seeking new tech partners: vendor-led content is the highest-performing kind, with analyst reports in second. For technology providers, this doesn’t mean the product quality isn’t key (service features still take first place when it comes to selecting a vendor), but the onus is on providing content that both demonstrates authority in certain sectors or products, and engaging professionals through trusted channels such as industry peers, reputable news websites and focused events.

Such is the case for BT Business, which utilised its partnership with ITPro to promote its range of cybersecurity products and services to specialised sectors in the UK. The campaign allowed BT Business to raise its profile, build positive sentiment and trust, and generate highly qualified leads.

To read the full case study, click here.

Digital natives are now entering the workplace, primarily from Generation Z. These digital natives will bring a generational shift in their approach to work and how they embrace technology.

The term “digital native” was coined in 2001 by the education writer and speaker Marc Prensky. It is used to describe those who have spent their entire lives in the presence of smart devices, social media, gaming, and online platforms.

The level of connectivity that underpins digital natives provides them with an awareness and technical literacy that previous generations did not have. They are typically fluent in the use of smart devices and tend to be naturally comfortable with remote collaboration. Given digital natives’ proficiently with modern technology, there is an expectation they will be well prepared for engaging with modern business tools.

However, proficiency does not necessarily equate to understanding. A Star Wars quote comes in handy here:“I should think that you Jedi would have more respect for the difference between knowledge and wisdom.” This is just as true in technology, where familiarity with operating digital technology is not the same as understanding how the technology fundamentally works.

Therefore, promoting skills in coding and hardware remains vital in order to maintain strong technical skills and prevent a generational decline in digital literacy. Additionally, being from a specific age cohort may increase your chance of being a digital native but doesn't guarantee it.

Many of the devices that digital natives use, such as smartphones, tablets and laptops, are sealed systems – in that the device cannot be opened – and even changing the battery is no longer possible. This lack of access to the underlying hardware risks losing digital natives’ understanding of how the technology operates. It is akin to driving a car; whilst most of us understand how to drive a car and check tyres, most of us do not know how to strip down an engine or replace the exhaust.

Nonetheless, digital natives’ acceptance of modern technology means they will be more likely to be comfortable using digital devices to simplify their working practices.

Video gaming has become a ubiquitous part of our culture, especially for digital natives. There is now a realization within industry that learning requirements should be gamified in order to encourage engagement from younger employees. Furthermore, as a significant majority of digital natives will have grown up using game controllers, these technologies are now finding wider applications, such as in engineering and surgery as young people use controllers they already have hundreds or even thousands of hours’ experience in.

For example the US Navy is already using Xbox controllers for some submarine periscopes, as a cheap and intuitive control scheme for its submariners, as reported by The Verge.

Digital native considerations

It’s worth noting that digital natives often have a cultural perspective different to previous generations. The digital connectivity they have had throughout their development means they will have a greater awareness of other people and cultures. It is in this area that we may see the greatest influence of digital natives, as many seek to spread diversity and equality within the workforce. However, given the echo chamber effect of social media, more polarized views may become apparent.

One possible extension of greater cultural awareness could be digital natives choosing not to work for organizations that they do not view as behaving in an ethical manner. Organizations wishing to attract the largest talent pool need to ensure that not only do they behave in an ethical manner but that they are seen to be doing so. Therefore, engaging with community outreach and promoting ethical programs become necessities, in order to recruit from as wide a talent pool as possible.

Of course, the generational shift that digital natives bring is not a new phenomenon. Every new generation entering the workplace brings new cultural and sociological proclivities. When Generation X entered the workplace, they brought an understanding of the capabilities of computers. Although Generation X lacked the familiarity that digital natives have with digital devices, it nonetheless possessed a baseline understanding from education.

As stated earlier, not all of the incoming workforce will fit neatly into the assumption that digital natives will have an affinity with technology. There will of course be those from new generations that choose not to engage with digital devices and distance themselves from the connectivity of modern technologies, together with those whose families steered them away from technology.

Furthermore, digital nativity may vary according to class structure or regional divides. As the science-fiction author William Gibson once said; “The future is already here – it's just not very evenly distributed.” In those regions, we may witness a completely different generation entering the workforce in parallel with digital natives.

The future of digital natives

Looking to the future, beyond digital natives, Generation Alpha may have even greater digital literacy than digital natives. There is likely to be a greater acceptance of AI tools, as future generations will have grown up with them. Conversely, the lack of understanding of how the technology operates could also be amplified.

Ultimately, digital natives bring with them a greater fluency in digital devices, but to assume they also have a widespread understanding of how the technology operates is incorrect. However, they are generally comfortable with digital connectivity and have a greater awareness of other lifestyles and cultures. It is therefore incumbent upon organizations to incorporate greater inclusivity and diversity within their operational structure in order to engage with this new generation.

In order to enable them to perform using their strengths, businesses may need to provide training on the underlying the principles of how the technology operates. This can fill the most likely gaps in their understanding. Given their familiarity with technology, they should also be encouraged to share ideas for digital improvements, as they will possess insights that previous generations may not have.

Smart manufacturing is an emerging field surrounded by hype and, like all buzzwords, its definition can shift as new tools become more widespread and new terms find their way into the conversation.

In a broad sense, smart manufacturing is enabled by the design of processes using digital technology, which makes operations adaptive and flexible and responds to changes faster – sometimes entirely automatically.

Frameworks like the Internet of Things (IoT), Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), big data analytics, factory robots, and AI are the spokes of a wheel which work both independently and interdependently to drive smart manufacturing.

A 2011 working group convened by a Bosch executive and the president of the German National Academy of Science and Engineering defined it as:

“Manufacturing that improves its performance aspects with integrated and intelligent use of processes and resources in cyber, physical, and human spheres to create and deliver products and services, which also collaborates with other domains within enterprises' value chains.”

What is smart manufacturing: the common elements

Smart manufacturing builds are as varied as the companies and plants that use them, but common elements can include:

• IIoT sensors: A sensor tracks information in real-time such as how many pieces go overhead on a conveyor belt. Together with set parameters such as how long the belt is supposed to last, it can produce a more accurate maintenance schedule. It can then be replaced during downhours without interrupting operations before it becomes a problem – no more replacing still-working components because of a static maintenance plan or the expensive delays of a mid-production failure. Setups such as this often run on a private 5G network in order to operate with the lowest possible latency.
  
• Cobots: A command is sent to an autonomous robot fleet, and the human operator doesn't need to control (or know) which bot gets the job. The system figures out the unit that's closest and most suited, automatically engaging safety behaviors like stopping when there's a human coworker in its path.
  
• Digital twins: If you're inputting a new line into a plant, you can create a digitised 3D model of the whole operation, connect it with local Geographic Information System (GIS) data, and your live model can report on where best to situate components based on proximity to power outlets, input channels like doors, etc. At the largest scale, this process has been applied to entire nations such as Singapore’s digital twin.

Smart manufacturing vs industry 4.0

Although terms like smart manufacturing and industry 4.0 – sometimes referred to as the fourth industrial revolution (4IR) – are often used interchangeably, they refer to quite different things.

Like industry 4.0, smart manufacturing also connects up and downstream as data from raw material inputs and aftermarket consumer use metrics are fed back into the equation to constantly improve performance.

But it refers more directly to resources in the digital world helping processes in the physical world interact with each other better and creating the maximum possible value from physical infrastructure.

If you remember nothing else about the difference, remember this; industry 4.0 is the philosophy and smart manufacturing is the toolset.

As manufacturing became increasingly computerized in the 21st century, former World Economic Forum founder Klaus Schwab coined the term 'fourth industrial revolution' to refer to the new manufacturing era following the steam age (18th century), electrical age (early 20th century) and early automation age (the 1970s).

It describes methodologies that connect systems and domains together, blurring the lines between physical and digital as well as producer, supplier, and consumer. Industry 4.0 is partly about technology but also human capital, enabling constant upskilling and reskilling.

Each technology plays its own role in bringing together all the boosts to efficiency and oversight that can be unlocked through smart manufacturing.

ML & AI

Algorithms collect, synthesize and action data that comes out of connected manufacturing systems across the supply chain. Information can be processed via AI or ML to predict product yields or identify inefficiencies on the manufacturing floor.

AR & VR

Whether it's a whole digital twin or simple a visual overlay of a single data point on a real-world system, using AR and VR you can walk through, look around and explore data presented in a digitized world to test a change you intend to make before committing funds and time to the real thing. Mixed reality is transforming city and urban planning already and has strong potential in manufacturing environments.

Robotics

A capstone technology since the 1960s, today robots come in more shapes and sizes than ever, can be programmed to perform – or learn – a wider variety of actions and can work safely alongside human colleagues.

Additive manufacturing

Also known as 3D printing, additive manufacturing involves building an item out of many small layers of material and has been part of manufacturing longer than most people realise. The latest generation of ever-finer prototyping and hybrid products/processes gives you more flexibility and higher speed to market than ever.

Big data

When every sensor on the factory floor is connected to the product throughout (and sometimes beyond) its manufacturing lifecycle, big data captured via IIoT sensors can provide constant insight into how to improve. Some of this data can be processed using edge computing for instant decision-making, while much of it can be stored for predictive analysis.Smart ports are a prime example of environments in which this has been successfully trialled.

Is smart manufacturing right for your business?

There are a lot of providers hoping you'll buy their smart manufacturing systems, so naturally lots of hype has been built artound the technology. The upsides are indeed considerable: smart manufacturing can improve production whether your aim is to reduce cost, work faster or create more room to innovate. It can also mean fewer nasty surprises from maintenance issues or breakdowns, along with slashed energy bills and reduced waste through efficiency gains.

You'll have fewer fail points and reruns, and everyone from your CFO to your customers will benefit. But do your research (and sums). Smart manufacturing can have a high implementation cost, so weigh up how much it will actually add to your bottom line (and over how long). It's also very complex, which means if you cut corners to establish it in systems or staff, it might cost more than it saves.

Adopting smart manufacturing will also put extra demands on security teams. For example, the number of IoT sensors required for an effective smart manufacturing setup call for a strong IoT security strategy.With systems all connected to each other (as well as those of suppliers, sales and marketing teams, customers, regulators and potentially countless others) across networks which could face the public internet, effective cyber security might mean the difference between business as usual and a costly data breach or ransomware attack.

Whatever the risks and rewards, smart manufacturing is a core part of the future, all the more reason to spend time now figuring out if it's right for your business.

Asynchronous collaboration has come to the fore as a popular way of working since the Covid-19 pandemic. Accommodating people’s home education, caring, personal wellbeing, and other needs led to increased asynchronous working, including for tasks that required collaboration.

Asynchronous collaboration is defined as a style of working where employees do not collaborate on a fixed schedule, and instead contribute on their own time. This contrasts with traditional 'synchronous collaboration', which sees employees collaborating across live video calls or in-person meetings at a set time.

Although most people will be familiar with synchronous collaboration, asynchronous collaboration has become popular as companies further embrace the freedoms associated with remote working and less rigid traditional working hours. 

It certainly won’t work for all businesses, and likely won’t be something that’s applied wholesale across a company – but for those that can support it, how do business leaders make it work?

Asynchronous collaboration requires a new way of thinking

Many business leaders fear that the creativity that comes from people attending meetings in person or virtually to mull over a problem, design or implement a project, and troubleshoot issues is ultimately lost in an asynchronous working environment. They feel creativity takes a back seat because people can’t feed off each other’s ideas in the same way.

There are also concerns that spontaneity can be stifled, as there are no water cooler moments, and no impromptu video call sessions when an idea is sparking off.

While this is certainly true for certain types of businesses, particularly those that have employees that are unable to work remotely, for many others it could be that they are simply investing in tools that aren’t fit for purpose.

“I think it’s always worth remembering that work is something you do, not a place where you go,” says Vanessa Stock, head of People and cofounder at Pitch, speaking to ITPro. “Teams that took their first toe dip into a remote, asynchronous working culture during lockdown didn’t necessarily share this mindset.”

She adds that trying to replicate the habits, processes and rituals of the physical work environment will often lead to unsuccessful trials.

Stock gave us one example from her own experience: “We replaced daily standups that can often interrupt flow or impact the rest of the day’s schedule with async updates, so teams can update when it works for them.”

Job van der Voort, co-founder and CEO of global HR platform and $3B unicorn Remote, concurs with the approach that asynchronous working can’t simply be a replication of what’s gone before.

He believes that one initial hurdle when switching to asynchronous working is “separating work from communication”, adding that “most people are used to doing both types of tasks simultaneously and may not have ever thought about the difference”. In a work environment with few meetings, he says it is “critical to have thorough, well-written documentation and to communicate updates transparently”.

Robust documentation is the key to successful asynchronous collaboration

Dan Lawyer, CPO at Lucid Software, manages his team asynchronously, and is proud that Lucid was able to design and launch a product during the first Covid lockdown. He is also critical of the way some organizations made the switch to remote work during the pandemic.

“Many business leaders attribute their collaboration challenges to the rapid switch to remote and hybrid work brought on by the pandemic,” Lawyer explains. “However, many of the issues, like spending too much time in unnecessary follow-up meetings, already existed before this switch and were simply exacerbated because of it. Addressing this problem requires firms to look for applications and tools that can add context, clarify ideas, and save workers time.”

Trust and strong leadership are also vital, says Job van der Voort. “Leaders need to ensure they are leaving well-written documentation that empowers their team to handle things without them. And workers must be enabled to default to action in the absence of explicit instructions. Both require a great deal of trust among the team.”

Policies should set out standards for documentation and communication, and be clear how training and support needs are identified and met. Training support might be broader than in a synchronous working environment, including, for example, not only how to use the tools provided for work, but also “how to leave good documentation, what good asynchronous communication looks like, and how to prioritize and make decisions independently”, says van der Voort.

Why you might consider asynchronous collaboration

Asynchronous working can bring some benefits that synchronous work can't – most notably speed.

“Real-time communication means everyone must be in the same place, or at least the same time zone, in order for work to happen. If workers need to wait for syncs to decide or act on something, it slows down the company as a whole and reduces its ability to compete,” says van der Voort.

Asynchronous collaboration allows people to work at their own pace, and does not force them to wait for input from others. Morning people, evening people, midnight oil people, collaborating across geographies, can in some cases deliver higher quality results than forcing everyone to come together for a 10am video call. To get this working well, policies such as having core working hours for each staff member, and having very clear goals and anticipated outcomes for all meetings, can be incredibly useful.

“One of the most significant and highly sought-after benefits asynchronous collaboration offers is a dramatic reduction in meetings,” argues Lawyer. “It allows team members to contribute in the least amount of minutes, freeing up time for other work.”

Another benefit is hiring from a bigger talent pool. If your workers can be anywhere in the world, the talent pool is wider, available skill sets broader, and opportunities to increase diversity greater.

Successful asynchronous collaboration simply can’t be achieved using the same mechanisms as office based working, or remote working with standard office hours.

“Asynchronous collaboration is far more than just sending an email instead of scheduling a meeting. It requires intentionally enabling your team with a strategic mix of tooling, practices, and culture,” adds Lawyer.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has published research into a ‘toggle switch’ aimed at making quantum computers more versatile and help cut down on noisy circuits.

Noise has bedevilled designers of quantum computers and is essentially random behaviour that can create errors in qubit calculations.

IBM recently published research revealing how errors can be mitigated to the point where a quantum computer could outperform classical supercomputing methods.

Rather than suppressing errors, IBM’s researchers explored a portfolio of mitigation techniques, including probabilistic error cancellation and Twirled Readout Error eXtinction (TREX).

The NIST approach relies on what is referred to as a “toggle switch”, a device that connects the qubits to a circuit called a “readout resonator”. When the switch is off, the elements are isolated from each other, but when on, the qubits can interact and perform calculations. Once complete, the switch can then connect a qubit to the readout resonator for result retrieval.

The toggle switch and readout circuit must be made of superconducting components and the switch itself is made from a superconducting quantum interference device. Interactions between the qubits and the readout resonator are induced by driving a microwave current through a nearby antenna loop.

While currently at the research stage, the approach also has the benefit of introducing programmability to otherwise static architecture.

Does this mean that quantum computers are just around the corner?

Possibly. While the research from NIST only deals with two qubits and a single resonator and must be operated at very low temperatures, plans are afoot to add more qubits and resonators.

However, actually constructing a quantum computer using such techniques with enough qubits to solve problems that are currently insurmountable remains in the future.

That said, quantum computing does seem to be nearing utility. Following its error mitigation research, IBM expects to complete its Quantum systems over the next year. The machines will be powered by a minimum of 127 qubits and, according to IBM, will provide access to computational power “large enough to surpass classical methods for certain applications”.

IBM has coined the term ‘utility-scale’ - the point at which quantum computers could serve as scientific tools to explore a new scale of problems that classical systems may never be able to solve. With the company’s IBM Quantum systems due for completion by the end of 2024, that point is now in sight.

Other companies, such as Intel and Microsoft have similarly made strides toward usefulness.

What could this technology be used for?

Quantum computing has historically been long on promise and short on result. However, the IBM team has been able to generate large, entangled states that simulate the dynamics of spins in a model of material and accurately predict properties such as its magnetization.

Other uses include healthcare and life sciences, where researchers are looking into using quantum chemistry and quantum machine learning to accelerate molecular discovery. There are potential applications in high energy physics and optimization as well as further work in materials simulation.

The words “quantum machine learning” might make some observers concerned. Dell CTO John Roese recently argued that the technology would prove far more disruptive than the current upheaval caused by generative technologies.

There is also concern that quantum computing, once useful, could be used to decrypt data secured with, for example, an RSA algorithm.

Quantum computing has long been a technology that has proven elusive. Recent developments have shown that a useful computer, capable of outpacing classical approaches, is now years rather than decades away.

The US government has announced plans to invest $500 million to transform cities in ‘America’s heartland’ into regional ‘tech hubs’. 

The Regional Technology and Innovation Hubs (Tech Hubs) program aims to drive innovation, unlock economic opportunities, and bolster cross-sector collaboration between industry, the education sector, and local and state governments.

Hubs created as part of the program will focus on developing a range of technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, biotechnology, cyber security, and more. 

This first notice of funding opportunity will see applications opened for planning grants and Tech Hubs designations, the DoC confirmed. A second stage for applications is expected to launch later this year. 

The Tech Hubs program was authorized through the CHIPS and Science Act, and will see up to $10 billion in total set aside for development of sites and programs across the country. 

The first batch of $500 million will be designated for initial planning grants, while individual grants of up to $75 million will be awarded later in the year to support expansion of the hubs. 

Driving regional innovation

US secretary of commerce, Gina Raimondo, said the launch of the new hubs will deliver economic benefits for regions in the US that have been “historically overlooked”. 

“The Tech Hubs program is a critical piece of President Biden’s Investing in America strategy, and will help us create ecosystems of innovation to strengthen economic opportunity in communities around the country that have historically been overlooked,” she said. 

“We’re going to do that by supercharging our existing innovation foundations, bringing together our premier research institutions with world class companies to create good-paying jobs in these communities, and ensuring the technological advances that define the next century are made in communities across America.”

In a briefing call with reporters last week, Raimondo said the focus on historically overlooked states will spur economic growth and play a key role in addressing the traditional Silicon Valley-centric flow of venture capital. 

Raimondo told reporters that around 80% of US venture capital funding is invested in Northeast and Southern California, as well as the San Francisco Bay Area. 

“There’s so much more potential for tech innovation all across the country,” she said. 

“In the US, we have the best research institutions in the world. That’s indisputable. And frankly, many of them are in America’s heartland.”

Regional support ecosystems

The Tech Hubs program bears similarities to other government-backed programs launched elsewhere globally as administration’s seek to bolster regional support for areas traditionally left behind amid the tech boom. 

The UK government, for example, has signaled its intention to tackle a ‘London-centric’ mindset with regard to venture capital funding and support for tech companies and entrepreneurs. 

In the Spring Statement this year, chancellor Jeremy Hunt unveiled plans to invest £100 million ($125 million) in R&D projects across the country through the Innovation Accelerators program. 

The initiative was framed by the government as a new approach aimed at supporting individual city regions to enhance global competitiveness and create a more level playing field for regions across the country. 

Last week Rishi Sunak told attendees at the Business Connect conference in London that he was “unashamedly pro-business” while pushing the government’s latest buzzword, ‘Unicorn Kingdom’. 

The new term, which admittedly prompted a collective cringe-induced grimace throughout the UK tech ecosystem, does appear bold and ambitious. 

Sunak explained that the government’s latest attempt to accelerate growth in the UK tech sector centers around drawing upon expertise from Silicon Valley in an attempt to embed its lauded entrepreneurial spirit across the UK ecosystem. 

“We just launched a campaign in Silicon Valley,” he said. “Just talking about our companies, what they were doing. Some of our ministers were out there the other week.”

"It was a huge success. It was called Unicorn… what was it called? ‘Unicorn Kingdom’."

The government has made no secret of its ambition to become the ‘next Silicon Valley’ in recent months as it looks to position the country as a leading global tech economy. 

But while slogans like ‘Unicorn Kingdom’ and aggressive marketing of the UK tech sector seem proactive on the surface, if one were to chip away at the veneer of British tech exceptionalism, the current outlook appears rather concerning.

Venture capital decline raises eyebrows

Recent analysis of the state of venture capital investment in the UK shows that the industry is in a precarious position. And while the UK ecosystem isn’t unique in witnessing a decline in VC funding, the numbers should be a cause for concern. 

A total of £2.9 billion ($3.6 billion) was raised by UK firms in the opening three months of the year, statistics show. This quarterly funding rate marks the lowest raised by companies in a single quarter since 2020, and is “significantly down” on the £12.3 billion ($15.2 billion) raised in Q1 2022. 

Additionally, deal volumes were also “muted”, KPMG revealed, with just 402 deals recorded across the quarter. This marks the smallest number of deals completed since KPMG launched its Venture Pulse report. 

With UK tech companies experiencing acute pressure from the decline in venture capital of late, the prime minister’s ambition could find itself on rocky ground in the months ahead. 

Furthermore, if it’s a unicorn kingdom that the government seeks to build, then a similar analysis of the current UK tech landscape raises yet more concerns. 

Unicorn kingdom or unicorn winter?

In its final industry overview report before closure in March, Tech Nation warned that the country could be on the cusp of a ‘unicorn winter’ due to a lack of support for high-growth companies operating across the ecosystem. 

It found that 2022 saw a decline in the rate of unicorns created, with just 4% growth across the year. This, the report noted, marked a ten-fold decrease in the number of unicorns created between 2020 and 2021. 

A key contributing factor for this looming unicorn winter, Tech Nation suggested, was that the government has failed to provide greater support for high-growth startups amid a significant economic slowdown. 

The former industry champion called for the government to create the “right conditions” to facilitate the creation of tech unicorns and enable companies and founders to thrive. 

This included greater support for founders pursuing late-stage exits, addressing current gaps in access to finance for startups and scale-ups, and a sharpened focus on attracting and retaining industry talent. 

The issue of scale-up support was once again highlighted by tech leaders in a recent virtual Q&A with Sunak on LinkedIn. 

Leaders at a range of top UK-based firms, including Monzo, raised concerns over government-backed support for overseas expansion and support mechanisms that enable companies to scale up. 

This in itself suggests that many industry stakeholders harbor some doubts over the direction of support across the tech ecosystem. 

In the same week, the government was forced onto the offensive following the CMA’s decision to block Microsoft’s multi-billion-dollar acquisition of Activision on competition grounds. 

While the CMA’s ruling was widely expected by a host of industry analysts, the incident sparked a war of words with Microsoft in which the company questioned whether the UK was an attractive proposition for tech companies. 

Microsoft president Brad Smith told BBC News that the decision was “bad for Britain” and suggested that this highlighted a diminishing reputation for the UK with regard to tech investment. 

“There’s a clear message here,” he said. “The European Union is a more attractive place to start a business if you want some day to sell it. The English Channel has never seemed wider.”

A spokesperson for the prime minister countered Smith’s claims, noting that they were “not borne out by the facts”. 

“Last year the UK became the third country in the world to have a tech sector valued at $1 trillion, behind only China and the United States in terms of investment.”

Silver linings for UK tech

Smith’s reactionary comments were expected given the circumstances. However, the government’s retort makes a valid point - the UK is still a leading European tech economy and an attractive proposition for startups and founders. 

In recent years, there’s no doubt that the UK has cultivated a reputation as one of the world’s leading tech economies, ranked only behind China and the United States for venture capital investment.

Last year saw UK tech companies continue to raise investment at near-record levels despite obvious economic hurdles. Across the year, the industry raised £24 billion ($30 billion), more than France and Germany combined. 

Similarly, the UK has produced more than 400 high-growth startups since 2000, including more than 145 unicorns and 237 ‘futurecorns’, according to Q4 2022 figures from Dealroom for the government.

Tech Nation pointed out in March that the number of futurecorns also increased by 45% between 2021 and 2022, further underlining the fact that the tech ecosystem continues to produce dynamic companies - and this shows no sign of stopping. 

The UK could experience a “glut” of unicorns to come, largely due to the fact that many futurecorns were “well poised to gain value” in the future. This highlights the effectiveness of the UK at supporting companies to scale. 

All that’s required thereafter is to continue support once companies reach the high end of the value spectrum, Tech Nation said. 

Putting aside the prime minister’s rather cringeworthy statements around creating a ‘unicorn kingdom’, the ambition there is admirable. 

Fostering closer ties with Silicon Valley and its breadth of expertise will undoubtedly benefit UK tech stakeholders and aligns well with an ongoing vision to frame the British ecosystem in a similar light. 

And while there are lingering concerns about the impact of the current economic downturn on the UK tech ecosystem, the maturity of the industry at present stands it in good stead to weather the ongoing storm. 

Technology has played a key role in establishing new ways of working since 2020, but it means our work and personal lives have converged. For some among us, it means working longer hours, with less physical separation between work and home life. 

For many, too, the working day now involves back-to-back virtual meetings with little time for creativity or informal connection – both of which are fundamental elements of the overall experience. Recruitment, onboarding, and learning have also been challenged by the lack of in-person contact, with some employees feeling disconnected and unsupported. 

It hasn’t been all bad, though. Flexible schedules have been a huge help for people with care needs, while many appreciate dropping the hours-long commute every day. That freedom has indeed been harnessed in positive ways to rebalance work and life. 

Evidently, everything changed, but not everybody felt the change equally. Technology is  promoting an always-on culture and workers are burning out harder and faster as a result. Thankfully for businesses, though, these same technologies can be pivoted to stripping away the downsides of hybrid work. 

Did COVID-19 really cause productivity to rise?

Several studies into the effects of working from home during the pandemic have linked the lockdown with a rise in productivity, but the University of Essex and the University of Chicago conducted joint research that found the opposite. 

This study was unique in studying metrics rather than reported feelings, comparing productivity before and after the remote working phase of COVID-19 based on analysing data from more than 10,000 people working in a large Asian IT company.

The study found while total hours worked increased by roughly 30% – including an 18% rise in out-of-hours working – average output did not significantly change. Technology played a central part in facilitating this odd shift in working hours. The time spent in meetings powered by videoconferencing rose significantly during the pandemic, as did email traffic. 

Meetings could often break into what would otherwise be periods of uninterrupted work, which may have caused concentration loss and taken workers longer to complete tasks. The research also found while there were more meetings overall, there were fewer supervision meetings and coaching sessions.

“Our explanation is that there were more distractions at home – especially with children – and that the costs of communication and collaboration were significantly higher away from the office,” said Dr Christoph Siemroth, who worked on the study. 

“Time in formal meetings increased a lot, including teleconferences and email traffic also went up. Meetings and other coordination activities appeared to disrupt “focus time” when employees were able to work without interruption. 

“Additional evidence for this view is that employees networked less – they had fewer contacts with colleagues and business units both inside and outside the firm. Despite having more meetings, staff had fewer supervision meetings or coaching sessions.”

This is, however, just one study and others demonstrate the opposite. Those reliant on self-reporting show staff benefit from increased wellbeing, higher productivity and satisfaction, according to research by the UK Parliament. The picture is certainly mixed, and it isn’t an exact science. 

Fighting the always-on culture

What’s clear is the lines are blurring between remote workers’ work and personal lives, a development that Toby Pochron, employment director at law firm Freeths, suggests has continued post-pandemic. 

“With the ability to access work from the comfort of their homes, the line between work and personal time has become blurred,” he says, pointing to how always-on technologies have exacerbated this problem. 

Workers, for example, are constantly connected to not just friends and family but colleagues and employers through the same devices. The ever-present ability to check emails, for example, is a major problem. Once emails are checked, if “urgent” things are identified, there is a temptation to deal with them immediately, even if that means outside working hours. He also identifies virtual meeting fatigue – too many meetings, too frequently, which can lead to a feeling of stress and burnout. 

Amy Finn, people and talent expert, PA Consulting adds another dimension to the levels of stress and anxiety the “always on” culture can bring. She points out that hybrid working allowed some firms to focus on globalization or international working. This brings with it challenges as “employees have found they need to flex working patterns and work longer hours in order to collaborate with virtual teams”. This often removes workers’ control over schedules and may, again, contribute to longer working and out-of-hours working.

Using tech to fight the new burnout

Just as technology is a contributing factor to the new burnout, it can be used to help alleviate it. But it’s vital to recognize that technology is not the answer to burnout, just one tool in the box. 

Pochron suggests time management and productivity tools, mental health and wellbeing apps, and automation can all play a part in helping people manage their work-life balance and avoid burnout. He’s clear that managers need to take a positive role here, for example, “using software to track the performance of remote workers and adjust their workload, or provide them with additional support when necessary”.

Finn echoes this point, telling ITPro that employees need to take control of setting boundaries, but that there’s also a responsibility for the organization to “reset the boundaries and work with their people to define the new rules of engagement”. 

The Gallup report Amplifying Wellbeing at Work and Beyond Through the Power of Recognition, published in 2022, showed fulfilling employee recognition can reduce burnout such that employees are up to 90% less likely to report being burned out at work "always" or "very often". 

Technology can play a part here through digital recognition programs which support, celebrate and promote wellbeing and allow coworkers to bond across remote working situations. Gallup says such programs can help workers get to know each other and fortify social wellbeing.

In all of this, it is vital to realise a few home truths. Firstly, technology is a tool and, used poorly, it can fuel the problem of burnout. Used well, however, it can be a mitigation. Secondly, people are all different, and what one might see as a perfectly fine work pattern that doesn’t generate burnout, another might find challenging. Finally, the need for people to feel connected, valued and well-rewarded is equally important whether work is entirely from home, hybrid or office based. 

Amazon employees have reportedly launched an internal campaign to reverse the CEO's decision mandating a worldwide return to office push.

Corporate employees have formed a channel on the company’s Slack to argue for continued remote work. In it, a petition has been shared claiming that the new office policy “runs contrary” to the company’s promises.

CNBC reported that more than 14,000 had joined this channel by 21 February, a growing fraction of the roughly 300,000 global employees affected by the shift in stance on remote work.

Andy Jassy, CEO at Amazon, announced on 17 February that all Amazon corporate staff would be expected to return to the office at least three days per week effective from 1 May.

Dismayed employees have pointed to a 2021 commitment made by Jassy to continue remote working, and an acknowledgement that "no one-size-fits-all approach for how every team works best" when it comes to work patterns within the company.

Explaining the change in stance, Jassy said that leaders can more effectively teach staff when they’re in the same room, and that in-person meetings are a better way for employees to become immersed in the company culture.

“It’s not simple to bring many thousands of employees back to our offices around the world, so we’re going to give the teams that need to do that work some time to develop a plan,” Jassy wrote in a message to Amazon employees.

“We know that it won’t be perfect at first, but the office experience will steadily improve over the coming months and years) as our real estate and facilities teams smooth out the wrinkles, and ultimately keep evolving how we want our offices to be set up to capture the new ways we want to work.”

Reports have suggested that details on the return to office are still being finalised, including how it can apply uniformly across departments like human resources and software engineering.

Pragmatic Engineering’s Gergely Orosz cited discussions with insiders who stated that employees, managers, and human resources were surprised by the announcement and questioned its absence from the firm's recent all hands meeting.

The change in remote work allowances follows Amazon’s laying off of 18,000 staff, citing an uncertain economic climate and a need to preserve the long-term health of the company.

It also comes as the company approaches the first anniversary of the formation of Amazon Labour Union (ALU), the first such organised group of Amazon warehouse workers.

What’s happening in big tech?

Tech workers have long been the beneficiaries of policies such as remote work, and during the pandemic companies allowed a growing number of employees to move away from the office full-time. Since then, these promises have been slowly reneged, amid wider cuts to workforce numbers and hiring goals.

Twitter, which was among the first to tell employees to work from home indefinitely, has since mandated staff return to offices and decimated their benefits, while in leaked audio obtained by ABC News, CEO Elon Musk was heard to say “if you can show up at an office and you do not show up at the office: resignation accepted. End of story".

But while big tech layoffs appear locked into most corporate strategies at the moment, wisdom on remote working has differed, and some have argued that turning back the clock on hybrid work is a mistake.

Earlier in February, GitHub announced it would go fully remote in the same breath as announcing that 10% of its workforce would be fired.

In November, LinkedIn’s Global Talent Trends report noted that employers are posting fewer remote job positions, even as demand for remote jobs has increased.

Leading analysts have advised businesses to continue to spend heavily on IT in 2023, despite economic challenges, saying the investment is likely to be "recession-proof".

Some IT leaders will continue to invest heavily and view current economic conditions as a prime opportunity to build new, more resilient revenue streams, enhance organisational processes and position themselves as more relevant to their customers.

Others will fail to capitalise on this opportunity. Those who adopt a more conservative approach to IT spending and ‘hunker down’ in the year ahead could find themselves at serious risk of falling behind competitors.

The comments were made by John-David Lovelock, distinguished VP analyst at Gartner, to IT Pro ahead of the unveiling of the consultancy's research on Wednesday. It predicted that IT spending will increase by 2.4% from 2022 to $4.5 trillion in 2023.

This forecast follows the previous quarter's prediction that IT spending was expected to increase by 5.1%, highlighting concerns over spending as the global economy braces for an impending recession.

Inflation and economic disruption have rapidly eroded consumer purchasing power, Gartner noted, while device spending is also down among enterprises. But despite challenging conditions, overall IT spending is expected to remain strong.

The software and IT services segments, for example, are projected to grow 9.3% and 5.5% respectively across 2023.

In particular, Gartner predicted that the IT services market will continue to grow as organisations seek to bring in outside staff to bolster support and implementation of IT projects.

This could see consultancy spending reach $264.9 billion in 2023 – a 6.7% increase from the year previous.

John-David Lovelock, distinguished VP analyst at Gartner, said that while inflation has “devastated” consumer markets, many enterprises will continue to increase spending on digital business initiatives.

“A turbulent economy has changed the context of business decisions and can cause CIOs to become more hesitant, delay decisions or reorder priorities,” he said.

“We’ve seen this in action with the reshuffling taking place among some B2B companies, especially those that overinvested in growth. However, IT budgets are not driving these shifts, and IT spending remains recession-proof.”

‘Recession-proof’ IT spending

Lovelock said that IT spending outlooks for the year ahead should inspire confidence among senior technology leaders.

“Overall, I think enterprise IT spending in 2023 is going to be recession-proof,” he said. “There’s no doubt about it.”

Lovelock warned, however, that as businesses seek to traverse difficult economic conditions, there is a serious risk that a "chasm" emerges between businesses seeking to invest their way out of a recession and those seeking to hunker down and weather the coming storm.

“The split between the companies that will investment heavily in IT and those that don’t is going to be higher this year than ever. The polarisation in the market between the ‘IT buyers’ and the ‘IT hesistants’ is going to get wider than we’ve seen in an awfully long time.”

“The division between the high spenders and the low spenders will be greater than we've ever seen in an awfully long time. 2009 is probably the last time we've seen a split this big,” Lovelock said.

“And it does tend to come around economic uncertainties. There are companies that either say IT is a solution to problems, and those that see IT as an expense.

“There are fewer that say it's an expense - more of them would see it as a solution or the only way out, and there's more spending from them. But then there will be this big chasm.”

OutSystems has announced a new partnership with enterprise automation firm UiPath that the pair say will help customers improve productivity and bridge talent gaps through improved automation.

The collaboration will combine UiPath’s Business Automation Platform with OutSystems’ high-performance low-code to enable customers to automate core business processes and applications.

Solutions and services will also be integrated with a new connector that allows UiPath software robots to be managed from within OutSystems applications, designed to help prevent vendor lock-in and maximise ROI.

Rui Pereira, VP of Global Channel at OutSystems, said that digital transformation pressures are creating a mandate for organisations to make “smarter, more efficient workplaces and effortless experienced for customers”.

“Our high-performance low-code development approach, combined with the power of UiPath automation, provides our joint customers with a proven roadmap to higher-order efficiency gains,” he said.

“The result of this integration enables IT leaders to bridge the talent gaps of their teams in order to accelerate innovation and generate massive value for their organisations.”

OutSystems’ high performance low-code platform provides tech developers the tools to build and deploy their own business-critical applications at pace.

With its new partnership with UiPath, the firm says customers can now also apply automated processes end-to-end across departments and systems of record, as well as leverage easy-to-use design interfaces and native integration that reduce development times and help rapidly deliver composite apps.

Users can also incorporate AI and Machine Learning to automate document understanding, image analysis, language analysis, and comprehension, while enterprise-grade RPA will automate manual application testing.

“More than half of large enterprises today have four or more simultaneous automation initiatives - and this number is only expected to rise over the coming years,” explained Dhruv Asher, UiPath Senior Vice President of Alliances and Business Development.

“Our partnership with OutSystems will be integral to serving this growing market demand and enabling our joint customers to deploy complex automation at scale.”

The tech industry has seen a pronounced decline in job postings in recent months but demand for new office space in tech-heavy cities declined among the least in July.

That’s according to the latest VTS Office Demand Index (VODI), which tracks new tenant tour requirements – both in person and virtual – of office properties in core U.S. markets and is the earliest available indicator of upcoming office leasing activity.

In terms of job posting measures, the tech industry registered a more pronounced decline in recent months compared to the overall labor market, which peaked around late 2021 and early 2022.

The contrast was particularly notable in San Francisco and Seattle, where the VODI found Indeed job postings to have fallen by 9.4% and 9.5% since March, respectively. For comparison, all other markets registered declines of between 1.8% and 6.5%.

Despite this decline, demand for new office space in the cities declined the least in July, falling just 7% and 14% month-over-month, respectively – which is still well below their pre-pandemic normal, VTS said.

“At the city-level, the slight cooling of the job market, does not appear to have impacted new demand for office space so far,” commented Ryan Masiello, Chief Strategy Officer of VTS.

“Despite recent economic concerns within the tech industry, which have even included layoffs at high-profile companies, office demand in Seattle and San Francisco actually fared better in July than the other VODI-tracked cities, which is likely due to the reluctance of tech firms to re-emerge in the market meaningfully from the pandemic trough.

He added: “It remains to be seen whether these tech-centric markets will see office demand impacted on a larger scale in the coming months.”

Overall, New demand for office space fell to just over half of its pre-pandemic pace in July. Countrywide demand dropped 11 VODI points from 63 to 52 in July, which equates to a 17.5% month-over-month decline, falling to its lowest level since February 2021.

While July declines are typical – July 2018 saw a 4.5% drop, followed by a 5.7% fall in July 2019 – this one is three times greater, VTS said.

“We’re used to seeing demand for office space cool in summer months, but not at this rate,” commented Nick Romito, CEO of VTS. “Unique to 2022 is an economic outlook that is continually shifting and is likely contributing to a reduction in new office demand, as uncertainty causes some potential tenants to delay or reconsider their current office space needs.

This month’s declines also come after three months of relative stability observed in the VODI, he added.

“Quarter-over-quarter, the VODI is down 20 percent, similarly in the quarterly trend to that of this month’s 17.5 percent fall speaks to that stability,” he continued. “The continued positivity in labor market performance is a hopeful indicator as we gauge employers’ reactions to other economic concerns in the months to come.”

Chicago, Boston, and New York City saw the largest VODI declines in July, with all three cities having a relatively large share of finance, insurance, and real estate (FIRE) among their office-use demographic.

It’s a sector that is particularly sensitive to rising interest rates – a characteristic that aligns with these cities’ sharp decline in new office demand. As a result, demand in Chicago dropped 29.9% to below half of its pre-pandemic pace, while Boston and New York fell 26.1% and 16.2% month-over-month respectively.

Electric car major Tesla faces yet another roadblock as Germany’s road traffic agency recalls models Y and 3 after detecting a flaw in the car maker’s automatic emergency call system.

By far, the software glitch affects approximately 59,129 vehicles globally.

The German federal authority for the road, Kraftfahrt-Bundesamt (KBA), has warned that the software flaw causes Tesla’s eCall emergency system to malfunction, preventing automatic contact with first responders during an emergency.

The mass recall was first reported by regional broadcaster Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg (RBB) on Saturday. It’s unclear how many of the affected 59,129 vehicles were registered in Germany.

In its second-quarter report, Tesla mentioned it delivered 17.9% fewer electric vehicles than the previous quarter, as China's ‌Covid-19 shutdown affected supply and production.

Additionally, Tesla's new factories in Texas and Berlin are "losing billions of dollars" due to Chinese port issues and a shortage of batteries.

Tesla's progress is supposedly further hampered by the recent eCall software glitch.

Dell has announced the latest iteration of its XPS 13 laptop, which it says has been redesigned to make it slimmer and more energy efficient than ever.

Designed with portability in mind, the 13.4-inch device features a motherboard that’s 1.8x smaller than its predecessor and the smallest ever made for a Dell laptop. As a result, the new XPS 13 measures just 14mm in thickness, with a weight of 2.6 pounds (1.2kg).

That reduction has enabled the manufacturer to make improvements elsewhere, with the laptop now only requiring a single cooling fan compared to the two used in last year’s range. Additionally, the extra space inside the unit has allowed Dell to spruce up the speaker system, which the firm says now offers louder sound and deeper bass, as well as offer a larger battery for up to 12 hours of use.

Despite these benefits, however, this size reduction has been offset with a compromise: machine components such as memory, storage, and battery are not user replaceable.

Like the XPS 13 Plus released earlier this year, this offering also ditches the headphone jack and, while Dell does provide a USB-C to 3.5mm adapter in the box, that will use up one of the XPS 13’s two available USB-C ports.

In terms of the display, the US model features a 13.4-inch, 1,920 x 1,200-pixel touchscreen, which offers 500-nit brightness and 100% sRGB color gamut.

Under the hood, the laptop sports 9-watt 12th-gen Intel processors (Core i5-1230U or Core i7-1250U), which Dell says can run at 12-watts in Performance Mode to match the performance of previous processors used in the range.

The new XPS 13 is available now for the line’s usual price of $999 in the US.

Dell XPS 13 2-in-1

Alongside the refreshed XPS 13, Dell has also unveiled its upcoming XPS 13 2-in-1 device, which takes fresh aim at the premium detachable market.

Available later in the summer, the Windows 11 machine is the manufacturer’s first XPS model with optional built-in 5G connectivity and runs on Intel’s 12-gen processor chips like its XPS 13 cousin.

The device features a 13-inch, 3:2 touchscreen display that offers 3K resolution (2,880 x 1,920), as well as 500-nit brightness and 100% sRGB color gamut. There’s also a front-facing 1080p camera twinned with a rear-facing 4K counterpart.

The XPS 13 2-in-1 weighs in at 1.6 pounds for the Wi-Fi model or 1.8 pounds for the aforementioned 5G variation – but the XPS Folio keyboard and Stylus pen accessories will be sold separately.

Whether you're a home worker, hybrid worker, or always on the move, these powerful, portable devices will make sure that you're effective.

Working practices are in a state of flux. We've never been so free to work from where we like and even when we like, with flexible working practices now very much part of the mainstream. Yet some businesses are pushing back, with many larger enterprises now asking employees to return to the office for more days per week. According to the latest figures from the UK Office of National Statistics, only 13% of workers now work completely from home, down from 26% in early 2022. A larger proportion – 28% – are hybrid workers, working between the home and office.

Meanwhile, more and more of us are embracing a different lifestyle, working full-time or freelance from a wide range of locations – or even working while we live abroad or travel.

This makes it all the more important to have devices that are as flexible as possible; that deliver a balance between size, weight, and portability, without sacrificing performance or battery life. Different workers will have different requirements, prioritizing mobility, speed, or screen size according to their location and their workloads. The trick is finding the right laptop to meet your specific needs.

What is the best laptop for home workers and digital nomads?

If you're working primarily from home, comfort comes first. You need a device that enables you to stay productive all day long, with good ergonomics and a screen that's fit for multitasking. Size, weight, and even battery life aren't so important on a laptop that spends most of its time on one desk.

The same can't be said for hybrid workers. Size and weight matter on a device that you'll be carrying between home and work, while a longer battery life gives you more flexibility over when and where you charge. Connectivity is crucial if you're moving between home and office networks, or connecting to different desktop keyboard, mouse and monitor setups across the two locations.

For fully remote workers or digital nomads, the requirements shift again. You need to balance comfort with having a device that can work effectively in a wide range of scenarios, whether that's a client's office, the kitchen table, the hotel desk, a coffee shop, or on your lap. If you spend a lot of time on trains, planes, or in airports, you may need something that can work in cramped conditions, and that weighs as little as possible.

Performance is important, but most mid-range business and consumer laptops will be fast enough for mainstream productivity applications, and it's only when you get to creative applications or more demanding specialist roles that you'll need to push the boat out on a high-end CPU or GPU.

The big trend this year is towards AI PCs, which feature dedicated neural processing units (NPUs) to power through complex AI operations with a lower power overhead. Right now, neither Windows, Microsoft Office nor most applications make enough use of the NPU to make an AI PC a must-have, but it's arguably worth investing in one anyway. Not only do these devices give you a degree of future-proofing, but the new processors tend to be the most energy-efficient, giving you significantly more battery life. As any digital nomad knows, this is actually more useful than raw speed.

When you're making your choice, don't neglect the less interesting stuff. Warranties, repair packages, insurance, and replacement services are a sound investment for laptops that spend some or all of their time out in the wild. There are higher risks of damage, loss, and theft, and you may need European or global cover. If your chosen manufacturer or supplier can't provide the after-sales support you need, either look elsewhere or find a third-party service specialist or insurer.

The Inspiron 14 Plus isn't the thinnest, lightest, or most exciting laptop on this list, but it's a fantastic option for remote workers on a budget. With a compact 314 x 224mm footprint and a 1.3KG weight, you can use it just about anywhere, while its 14in 2.5K screen makes for comfortable multi-tasking. It's basic, with a 60Hz refresh and mediocre color gamut coverage, but bright and fine for everyday productivity tasks. Two USB 4.0 ports and Wi-Fi 7 give you future-proof connectivity, while the keyboard, trackpad, and webcam are all perfectly respectable.

This is one of the cheapest devices around with a Qualcomm Snapdragon X CPU, and while it's the lower-end Plus variant, it's still impressively fast. Battery life isn't quite up to the levels of the top Snapdragon X laptops, thanks to a smaller 54Wh battery, but you can still get through a full day of intensive graft without serious concerns. And with prices starting at £708 ex VAT, it's a device that even cash-strapped small businesses can afford.

Read our full Dell Inspiron 14 Plus review here

The Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3x has been released as one of Lenovo's initial AI PCs, with an onboard neural processing unit (NPU) designed for AI workloads. In our tests, the IdeaPad Slim 3x proved a great all-rounder for business, handling productivity tasks without complaint and running onboard AI software such as Microsoft Copilot with little to no delay.

One element that slightly lets down the IdeaPad Slim 3x is its display, a 1920 x 1200, 60HZ IPS offering. This is a lower resolution than one might expect in 2025, and it can struggle to be bright enough to remain visible when used outdoors. If you're planning on snapping this up for remote work, just make sure you're not looking to respond to emails on the beach.

Luckily, the IdeaPad Slim 3x makes up for this with its relatively lightweight – 1.6kg – and decent 6-7 hour battery life. Though the latter is below some others you may find on the list, Lenovo has covered this too with fast charging capabilities, meaning a 15-minute charge will net you another two hours of productivity.

Read our full Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3x review

Creatives and power users need look no further than the Yoga Pro 9i 16. The 16-inch screen and high-performance spec means a bigger desktop footprint and 1.68Kg weight, but it's worth it to have a massive mini-LED display and a dedicated NVIDIA GPU. The screen hits eyeball-melting levels of brightness – up to 1060cdm/m2 in HDR mode – with superb contrast and near-perfect color reproduction. Meanwhile, the 16-core Ultra 9 185H CPU and RTX 4070 GPU give you awesome performance across creative applications, 3D rendering, scientific apps, and even games – and the slightly cheaper RTX 4060 version doesn't stint on power, either. Fan noise stays surprisingly low.

On top of this, you get an excellent keyboard with slightly concave keycaps and a smooth 1.5mm of travel, a large and effective trackpad, and a 1440p webcam that delivers good results even in less-than-perfect lighting. You also have two USB 3.2 ports, one with the faster USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 spec and one supporting Thunderbolt 4, plus an HDMI 2.1 video output and Wi-Fi 6E. It's the perfect powerhouse laptop for mostly home-based creatives but light enough for mobile use as well, even if the 84Whr battery can only power it for around 9 hours. If you do want to go smaller and lighter, take a look at the equally brilliant Asus ProArt PX13.

Read our full Lenovo Yoga 9i Pro review here

For sheer affordable excellence, the Asus Vivobook S16 is hard to beat. This 16-inch, sleek business laptop boasts snappy performance, great form-factor, and all-rounder connectivity.

The Vivobook S16's standout feature is its excellent OLED display, which delivers a resolution of 3,200 x 2,000 with a pixel density of 236dpi. Sometimes, otherwise sharp displays can fall short on color accuracy, making them unsuitable for creatives or other professionals for whom true-to-life colors are a line in the sand.

Thankfully, the Vivobook S16 scored an impressive gamut volume of 165.3% sRGB in our tests, as well as 117.1% DCI-P3 and 113.9 AdobeRGB. On performance metrics, the Vivobook S16 scored admirably, with the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H and 16GB LPDDR5 delivering ample power for everyday tasks and slightly more demanding workloads alike.

While this isn't a laptop to take on the likes of the latest MacBook Pro – managing just 9 hours and 21 minutes in our battery test compared to the MacBook Pro 16's 15 hours and 44 – it is nonetheless a pretty package for those seeking a dependable business machine.

Read our full Asus Vivobook S16 review here

The one downside of the new Qualcomm-based Copilot PCs is that compatibility can be an issue. Between improved ARM64 processor support and Microsoft's Prism emulation layer most apps and drivers work well at decent speeds, but there are always exceptions. This is where the Asus Zenbook S14 wins. It uses Intel's new Core Ultra 9 288V 'Lunar Lake' CPU, which gives you equivalent or better AI performance and a faster GPU than the equivalent Snapdragon X processors. Multi-threaded performance isn't quite as good, but battery life can be phenomenal, with the Zenbook S14 lasting over 19 hours in our tests.

What's more, the Zenbook S14 is a superb thin-and-light 14in laptop, with the kind of footprint you'd expect from a 13in device and a very manageable 1.2Kg weight. It comes in a lovely matte ceramic finish and features an excellent keyboard and responsive touchpad. Connectivity is better than average, with Wi-Fi 7, two Thunderbolt 4 ports, a USB Type-A, and an HDMI 2.1 output. The OLED screen doesn't go incredibly bright, but you get perfect contrast and unimpeachable color reproduction. It's a brilliant option whether you're a hard-working mobile creative or an executive clocking up the air miles.

Read our full Asus Zenbook S14 review here

It's best to see the Surface Pro 11 not as a clever, convertible tablet, but as an excellent ultraportable PC. The click-on, click-off keyboard is pretty much a requirement, and even with it attached the whole shebang weighs just 1.23Kg. The ingenious kickstand holds the screen up in a wide range of positions, and the unit is extremely robust. You can even switch out the supplied storage yourself for a 30mm M.2 NVMe SSD. Not all ultraportables can say the same.

There's a limit to the connectivity you can fit into a tablet form factor, but with two USB 4 ports, Wi-Fi 7, and the standard Surface power/data connector, this isn't a huge issue. Microsoft's new Pro Flex keyboard can now work unconnected to the tablet and makes up for its limited travel with a lovely fast and clicky feel. And while entry-level versions have a decent 2880 x 1920 IPS display, mid-range, and high-end variants have a stunning OLED screen with vivid colors and a 120Hz dynamic refresh rate. Throw in the Snapdragon Elite XE-80-100 processor, and you have strong performance and formidable battery life, with nearly 16 and a half hours of video playback in our tests. If your priority is packing light, the Surface Pro 11 is a hard device to beat. Just remember to budget extra for the keyboard.

Read our full Microsoft Surface Pro 11 review here

The Lenovo ThinkPad range has a serious pedigree among business users – and for good reason. The latest iteration, the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon, retains the iconic ThinkPad styling and keyboard layout, while swapping out the chassis materials to reduce weight and improve its portability.

In our performance tests, the X1 Carbon excelled, achieving near M4 MacBook Air levels on a 4K test and a very respectable 2,725 and 10,937 in the GeekBench 6 single-core and multi-core tests. Lenovo has also addressed criticism of the battery life in previous ThinkPad models, with our battery video test pushing the machine to run for 20 hours and 45 minutes – far ahead of the MacBook Air.

A much-overlooked element of laptops for digital nomads is the keyboard and touchpad. Whether you're working from home or on the go, this is just as important as build quality in making the overall experience of using the machine a good one. In the X1 Carbon's limited space, it fits a responsive trackpad with optional haptics, a solid keyboard with excellent travel, a fingerprint scanner, a Copilot key for AI tasks, and of course, the iconic red TrackPoint that makes it even easier to use in confined spaces.

For more information, read our full Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition review

How we test

For laptops, IT Pro runs a series of tests on the display, CPU, battery, and storage, with the exact line-up of tests dependent on the laptop and its main usage scenarios. Our aim is to give you a metric for comparison so that you can make an informed decision.

For performance testing, we use Geekbench 6 as a cross-platform, baseline test, and PC Mark 10 and 3Dmark to provide a measure of real-world application and 3D performance. We may also incorporate other benchmarks, including the Cinebench R24 and 2024 3D rendering tests, the SPECViewPerf 2020 professional graphics benchmark, and the Geekbench AI and Procyon AI Computer Vision and AI Inference benchmarks.

For the display, we use a colorimeter to measure maximum brightness, contrast, and color reproduction for the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts. We also test against the sRGB profile for color accuracy. We also use the CrystalDiskMark and AS-SSD storage benchmarks to test the sequential and random read/write speeds of the onboard SSD.

Finally, we test battery life with a looped video test. The device is fully charged and the screen set to a specific brightness level of 170cd/m2. We then time how long the video keeps playing before the laptop reaches a critical brightness level and switches off. This gives us a time score we can compare with other laptops and helps us estimate how long the laptop will last during working hours.

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The timeframe for large-scale enterprise resource planning (ERP) transformations has been slashed from months, and in some cases years, to just a matter of weeks.

Such programmes of change might be multi-staged and traditionally required intense planning and execution that takes place over up to a decade. However, a combination of conditions including the aftermath of COVID-19 has sparked businesses into moving fast.

“We’ve got examples of six weeks; of going from as-is to there in six weeks,” said SAP customer success lead and member of the SAP SE Executive, Scott Russell. “Now that is incredibly rapid.”

Speaking at SAP Sapphire, the Hague, Russell highlighted how the market has shifted considerably as soon as over the last 18 months, adding this movement is being driven by small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs).

Many customers of SAP’s newly launched RISE platform, for example, are mid-sized firms looking to implement rapid ERP transformations to keep up with the competition.

“[Businesses] are willing now to just move,” Russell continued. “Actually, I’ve seen programmes where they haven’t perfectly defined everything, but they’re moving and they will be agile enough to adapt as they go because they know that to wait is to give their competitors an advantage that they’re no longer prepared to do.”

“We just don’t see ERP long-term implementations anymore. The market doesn’t want to implement that way. We certainly don’t want to; we want to help them get time-to-value even if it’s in a multi-step journey.”

He echoed comments delivered by SAP president EMEA North, Rohit Nagarajan, who stressed in his keynote address that nobody was questioning whether or not transformation was necessary anymore.

Scott reinforced this by suggesting the biggest factor driving decisions right now is the fear of standing still. At the c-level, especially, executives are fearful of not changing, although are being held back by the barriers of culture and convention, particularly the established processes that already exist within their businesses.

Pushed further, Russell said the biggest concerns among its customers was, indeed, their CEOs and c-level executives dragging their feet. That behavioural and cultural change, specifically, was something they needed to overcome, in order to commit to and appreciate the benefit of undergoing fast-paced digital transformation projects.

New data has revealed the best UK towns and cities for those looking to work remotely.

A total of 104 locations have been ranked based on factors like house prices, green spaces, crime rates, air quality, local GP numbers, the quality of local schools, and broadband speeds, in price comparison service Uswitch's first ever Hybrid Working Index took.

York topped the chart as the UK’s ideal hybrid working location, which Uswitch broadband expert Ernest Doku attributed to “superfast broadband, huge amount of green spaces, and close proximity to work hub Leeds”.

Harrogate was another North Yorkshire town that made it to the top five best places for hybrid working. However, local hub Leeds was ranked 17th due to its high crime rates.

Edinburgh and Belfast were second and third on the list respectively, combining fast broadband speeds and relatively low house prices, while also being major office hubs in their respective areas.

However, some of the UK’s biggest cities, including London and Manchester, were found to be lower on the list due to their high crime rates and house prices, with comparatively slow broadband. While York had an average speed of 159 Mbits/sec, London’s and Manchester’s were at least 35% slower – at 102 Mbits/sec and 95 Mbits/sec, respectively.

Commenting on the findings, Doku said that “the last few years have turned our working lives on their head, and many of us have enjoyed the benefits of leaving the commute behind and spending more time at home”.

“It’s been an opportunity for many to escape the rat race, move away from the big cities and enjoy life in more rural settings,” he added.

Recent research found that one in two UK workers would consider quitting their job if the hybrid working option was removed.

Doku described the speed and reliability of broadband connection as a potential deal-breaker when moving to a new area to work from home.

He advised those moving houses to research the local broadband speeds before fully committing to a new area.

“Once you’ve got the move confirmed, don’t forget to let your existing (and potentially new) broadband provider know, so you’re not left offline when the big day comes,” he added.

The full rankings are detailed below.

Palo Alto Networks has announced the general availability of its SASE-based cyber security product that promises to protect business networks from vulnerabilities on employees’ home networks.

Dubbed Okyo Garde Enterprise Edition, the new service includes FedRAMP-compliant Prisma Access and a Wi-fi 6 router. Configuration and management are relatively easy through a mobile app, which also allows for the creation of separate private and personal networks.

Discrete networks help prevent data from commingling and eliminate the risk of attackers moving laterally from one network to another, stated Palo Alto Networks.

Most importantly, Okyo Garde Enterprise Edition, now available to businesses in the US and Canada, enables security operations centers (SOCs) and IT to keep close tabs on in-home corporate networks while ensuring security admins are not privy to employees’ personal networks.

The subscription-based service also helps safeguard unmanaged work devices at home, including printers and VoIP phones.

"The benefits for working remotely also come with the shared responsibility between employees and employers for protecting networks, as at-home use of personal devices, email and social media accounts increases the risk of cyberattacks on the enterprise," said Kumar Ramachandran, senior vice president of products at Palo Alto Networks.

"Okyo Garde Enterprise Edition is built upon the principles of Zero Trust and enables organizations to extend the corporate network and bring unified security policy management and SASE to the hybrid workforce. Together, Okyo Garde Enterprise Edition with Prisma Access extends that best-in-class security synonymous with corporate environments into the home," added Ramachandran.

IDC has revealed that 2021 was the strongest performing year for PC monitor shipments since 2012.

The research firm’s Worldwide Quarterly PC Monitor Tracker revealed that the market saw 143.6 million units shipped globally across 2021, which was the highest since the 150.3 million shipped in 2012.

However, a weaker second half of the year hampered the considerable momentum seen in the first, which registered year-over-year growth of a whopping 19.4%.

Challenges faced in the third quarter carried through to the fourth, with the market continuing its quarterly decline. As a result, shipments shrank 5.2% over the same period in 2020.

Despite mature regions slowing in that time, volume was strengthened by emerging markets catching up on backlogs, while global commercial volume helped to offset a “softer consumer base”.

“However, even as monitor component supplies improved to some degree, persistent challenges from high shipping rates and Asian supply chain lockdowns remained,” IDC said. “These challenges that defined the latter half of the year are expected to play well into 2022 and will lead to a 3.6% year-over-year decline in 2022.”

Overall, the market did still manage to exceed expectations, ending 2021 with a 5% year-over-year growth rate.

"2021 marked the end of the longest run for monitors, which saw an uninterrupted growth spurt from 2018 to 2021," said Jay Chou, research manager for IDC's Worldwide Client Devices Trackers. "Whether it was businesses refreshing PCs and monitors as they moved towards Windows 11 or the pandemic pivot towards work from home, these developments gave a much-needed boost to what had been a staid industry.

“However, we now see growing saturation, inflationary pressures from the pandemic and the Ukrainian crisis further accelerating an already cooling environment in 2022, when we expect monitor shipments to shrink 3.6% and then stabilize after."

In terms of individual companies, Dell and Lenovo were the only two in the current Top 5 to deliver shipment growth in Q4 2021, with both outgrowing the market and registering 7.2% and 6.3% growth respectively.

IDC said firms that had better control of their supply chain or a stronger presence in emerging markets fared better during the period.

Apple has filed a patent for a computer inside a keyboard, designed for easy transportation.

The patent document, titled "Computer in an Input Device", shows a computer housed entirely in a keyboard, reminiscent of the computer-keyboard combinations popular in the eighties.

Apple's design calls for an input device with a single I/O port for connection to a display and possibly other devices. It could also send or receive power to those devices.

One suggested configuration is a computer housed inside a keyboard, such as Apple's Magic keyboard.

Apple describes the contents of the keyboard as a high-end computer, and says that it would be a useful way to transport a small-footprint, high-end computer without extra cabling that could plug into any display.

This would create "a portable desktop computing experience at any location having one or more computer monitors", the patent document added. "For example, a user can transport a keyboard that houses a computer, as opposed to carrying an entire laptop or a tower and keyboard."

The configuration could also take other forms, it said in its filing.

"The computing device 100 can, for example, correspond to a virtual keyboard, a track pad or touchpad, a mouse, a tablet computer, a combination thereof, or other input devices," it said. A keyboard input mechanism could use capacitive touch rather than moving keys, it added.

Computers housed entirely in keyboard enclosures were a mainstay of the eighties computing market, when all-in-one devices such as Commodore's 64 and Amiga, and Atari's ST housed all of their computing components in a single unit. Even then, they would need external power cables and come with external storage devices or mice. More recently, Raspberry Pi introduced its 400 model, which includes its lightweight computer inside a keyboard (but still uses external power cables and a mouse).

It's possible that we could see a computer inside a keyboard from Apple. However, technology companies often file patents that never lead to commercial products.

This automatically-generated transcript is taken from the IT Pro Podcast episode ‘How to automate your business'. To listen to the full episode, click here. We apologise for any errors.

Adam Shepherd

Hello, I'm Adam Shepherd.

Zach Marzouk

And I'm Zach Marzouk.

Adam

And on this week's episode of the IT Pro Podcast, we're diving into the field of business process automation.

Zach

BPA isn't strictly a new technology, but over the last several years it's developed at an unprecedented pace. It's now sophisticated enough to be deployed in delicate information driven tasks like logistics, healthcare, and even finance.

Adam

The purpose of BPA is to remove human staff from repetitive manual tasks and hand them over to automated software, allowing employees to focus on more creative or customer facing jobs instead. When deployed correctly, this can increase efficiency enormously, and we're joined today by Paul McFarlane, CTO of Glasgow Credit Union, to discuss the process efficiency gains that his organisation has achieved through BPA. Paul, thanks for coming on the show.

Paul McFarlane

You're welcome. Pleasure.

Adam

So Paul, can you tell us a little bit about Glasgow Credit Union?

Paul

It might be best to explain a little bit about what a credit union is; I think a lot of people have some preconceptions as to what a credit union is - often wrong. It's essentially a cyclical business model. So it's a savings and loans business. It's designed to provide affordable source of credit to members, you need to be a member in order to join and borrow and save with us. We're not, we're not a poor man's bank, which is what people tend to think we are, we're not just there for financial exclusion, we are very much mainstream, at least, Glasgow Credit Union is a mainstream organisation. And we can provide services, certainly in terms of lending and savings, that can rival high street, better rates, et cetera. So so that's why we exist, it's a discrete group of members that have a particular bond together so for us, they either live or work within the Glasgow area. And they get together in order to save and then borrow from the same pot of money, from the same savings that's come in. Glasgow is quite different from the rest of the credit union sector. We're the largest in the UK, by quite a mile. In fact, we make up about 5% of the overall credit union industry in the UK. But it's still still a relatively small business, we're an SME with about 35 employees. But we've got a reasonable turnover but it's, it's a large business, to the extent that our asset size is approaching 200 million. So it's big numbers, lots of transactions that's going through, but it's still a very small footprint in terms of financial services, you know, tiny compared to banks and some building societies.

Zach

You've invested in BPA to speed up some of your internal processes. Were there any pain points in particular that you're trying to solve?

Paul

Yes, so we were trying to deliver some strategic growth within the the organisation. We had, we always want to lend more, we always want to grow our organisation. But we also had to reduce operational pressures in order to achieve that. There were a lot of bottlenecks within our business processes. If you think about what the business processes are for our organisation, we've got people who join us to become members, we then have to set up a savings account for them, we then have to set up a direct debit or a contribution for them, because the idea is that you save or you contribute regularly to your credit union account. So for most people that's either via direct debit, but we also have partnerships with local employers, and so you can save directly from salary. So it's like a salary deduction. And so there's various integrations with different kind of processes. And historically, that was all done manually, it was quite paper based processes, you had to fill in a form and it's a wet signature that was required. And, you know, so it was stripping back some of those processes, which was quite a challenge because you're trying to engage with other third party organisations, some of the employer partners that were sometimes reluctant to to walk away from those paper processes and making sure we were able to integrate with some of what what they were doing. But our processes were also reliant on people and our legacy systems, you know, weren't the best; our back office platform was designed for another time, it was written as an old VB6 application and while it served as well, you know, there's no shame for it, it didn't cost a lot of money to build and we've had 20 odd years out of it, so we can't complain about it, but it's, you know, it's exceeded its life. So we had to start thinking about what we do to complement that, and start to roll back some of those, some of the reliance on that platform. So we made the decision to look at process automation, because we simply couldn't continue to, to grow our business. Without making those kind of investments. Up until I joined the business in 2010, and kind of over the last 10 years, we've quadrupled in size and gone from a 50 million business in 2010, to just shy of 200 million today. And that's through process automation, because the strategy was very much people driven up until that point. And as we grew the number of members and the number of transactions, we added more and more employees, and you know, it's grown over the 20 or so years it was in existence up until that point, and that just wasn't feasible anymore, we didn't have the space, we were going to have to move into bigger premises, people are expensive, it's, you know.

Adam

And past a certain point they don't scale, right?

Paul

Exactly. That's that's exactly the point. And so, investing in process automation enabled us to achieve some of those economies of scale. But the pain points we had with deploying the process automation was we were not an IT focused business, we were not technically literate as a business; we had systems had been in place for a long time. And we we didn't have the capacity, or indeed the resources at the time, to start developing and start, you know, building interfaces and API's that would sit, sit in front of our existing back office. So we looked externally, and how to look externally to various different platforms, platforms like Laserfiche and Experian and different things that we could we could bring in to achieve some of those process automations that were, you know, they've got interfaces that sit within the software that they have that non technical, certainly non developers, can drag and drop into workflows to create smart workflows that can automate routine mundane processes. And it starts to free up your resources then to focus on other, on other tasks.

Adam

So you've gone for Laserfiche for your business process automation. For anyone who's not familiar, could you give a brief overview of how business process automation works in practice?

Paul

Laserfiche is quite unique, or we found it unique at the time, because it enabled us to automate a lot of our business processes through a user interface, a quite an easy to use user interface, that was able to drag and drop lots of different processes to make up various workflows. So, I can give you an example of how we use it, we deployed Laserfiche to automate the the documentation processes and the fulfilment of our loans. So when you think about the customer journey that you go through when you're when you're applying for credit. So you apply for your loan, you get a credit check, sitting behind that credit check is a series of decisions. So we used a different piece of software from Experian that enabled us to configure that decision engine to make a decision on the loan in an automated way. And if it wasn't able to, we weren't just simply chucking it away, we then handed it off to one of our underwriters to make a manual decision on that. Once that's done, we need to create a document. And that's where Laserfiche comes in. So that helps us create the, either the paper document for old school members that don't want to sign anything digitally. Or we were able to produce the document, an electronic document that can email a link to the customer to say, great, your loan has been accepted, click here to sign. Once that is digitally signed, the document comes back into our, back onto our network, drops into a network folder and through the workflow within Laserfiche, we've programmed that to pick up that document, scan it through into Laserfiche document retention software. So we're able to then hold the document for the, you have to keep it for seven years plus the the term of the loans, as a regulatory requirement. So we can set those retention periods on those documents as part of that workflow as well. So none of that's having to be done manually. So if it's a five year loan, we need to keep that for five plus seven years. So when those 12 years turn around, historically, we would have had people then going and trying to fish out those documents and destroy them manually. So all that's done for us now as part of this this process. Once that document's been archived, it's able to read the document, make sure it's been signed, all the fields are completed, it checks against the metadata that's attached to the document to match that back to our back office, our SQL database. To make sure no one's interfered with it, it's still a £5,000 loan or whatever. And it's not been it's not been doctored or anything. And then we can take that through our workflow to a documents return stage, which means it's ready for payout. And then we have other off the shelf software that then picks that up, and floats it through the back system to pay the customer through a faster payment. So in theory, if it's an automated decision, in theory, you can join us and apply to borrow, get a decision - If you sign your documents electronically, quite quickly, we can have the money in your bank within 15 minutes from from start to finish.

Adam

Wow.

Paul

Which is, you know, it's better than what some high street banks are offering. But there wasn't a lot of development. And when we we moved from non kind of IT-facing business, we were very much centred on customer facing, we had a contact centre and a back office, quite a large back office team of administrators, which we've kind of scaled back. And we brought in IT resources. And then we've got some some developers, but they weren't developing the process automation back then, they were developing the front-end, the self service for the customers, the mobile app that the customer uses to then interface with those back office tasks and process automation. So we were able to deploy a lot of the the process automation without being a coder, without having to develop anything. A lot of it was drag and drop. Yeah, the UI.

Adam

Yeah, that whole kind of low code, no code trend is something that that is really great for being able to stand up stuff quickly, without necessarily having a kind of huge demand on IT resource.

Paul

Definitely. And it was the way forward for us. I mean, as I say, we were a small business. And we, it was our first kind of foray into automation in a big way that was transformative within the business. So being able to do it through that low code, no code way, as you say, meant we were able to do it without spending big, without completely changing our resource needs, our headcount, and so on which, you know, going back a few years before this kind of stuff came on the market, that's what we'd have been looking at for that kind of, that kind of technology. So all of a sudden, this kind of technology is available to small businesses like us, to then rival bigger businesses and larger banks and building societies and put us on an equal footing with them.

Zach

Could you give us an insight into how long it took to implement BPA in the workplace? Like what was the timeline?

Paul

The timeline for us was was about three months. So we probably could have done that a lot quicker, the three month timeline was because we had to build a lot of front end stuff. So there's a lot of bespoke front end application forms and different things that we built. The actual business process automation, and configuring the workflows is really simplistic, and that can be deployed quite quickly. I'd suggest a number of days. If you weren't putting customised front ends on it to enable self-serving different things for customers. So ours was quite bespoke, which is what took the time. But yeah, Laserfiche is quite, it's quite an intuitive piece of software that you can, you can log in, because we've made changes to it, we've learned lessons as we've moved on, and we've made some changes to the to the workflows. And that's so easy as well, because you're not having to crack open the bonnet and you know, go in and get a developer and to start re-coding things and, and changing things. It's all drag and drop and plug and play. So you're just reconfiguring the workflow as you go.

Zach

And what kind of benefits have you seen from this BPA rollout?

Paul

There's been significant benefits as part of the process automation. It has helped us grow, which was the overall objective, and we've grown without any increase in headcount. It's not a revolution for the business, it's been an evolution over a period of years. And our headcount has more or less remain static for 12 years, despite the fact we've grown from 50 million, as I say, to 200 million. And so I think that's quite an achievement. And we've achieved that through process automation. So we are starting to see some of those economies of scale and making investments in something like Laserfiche, or some of the other process automation tools out there, has enabled us to make a spend once or have a small ongoing spend for maintenance, but it's much cheaper than resources. But that doesn't mean we've, you know, we've lost headcount, or we've just redeployed them. So we brought in a number of developers now, so our headcount's changed, it's a much more skilled headcount. Rather than having kind of semi skilled manual administration tasks, that's now transferred to much more contact centre roles. So we've redeployed people, we've had some natural attrition as well. So we've been quite lucky, it might be different if you're in a much larger organisation, if you've got a contact centre with thousands of people in it, or a, you know, massive batch processing centre, that that's going to look slightly different from what from what we had, but for a small business like us, we were able to achieve it without a lot of pain. But you know, there are still challenges, nobody likes change. People in contact centres, our administrators, it was difficult, but we got there. And they've embraced it, and they've embraced their new way of working. And it was the only way to do it, because it just wasn't feasible to keep doubling, you know, bringing in another underwriter and another couple of contact centre advisors, because you had to speak to somebody for a loan, you had to physically have something posted to you, you had to physically sign it, post it back; it took weeks. And just in, you know, 2010, 2012, 15, that's not how you do things. So, and the demand from our customers was to modernise, and we had to do something to keep us relevant for those customers, so it was definitely the right thing for us to do.

Adam

So on that kind of change management piece, I guess, was there much convincing that you had to do at a board level to try and get this project over the line? Because as you said, it's a fairly substantial departure from the sounds of it, compared to what you were doing before. Was there any resistance or was it quite easy?

Paul

It wasn't easy, though nothing's easy, trying to, trying to get a board decision. But there wasn't resistance as such, there was...

Adam

Caution, let's say.

Paul

Yeah, there was an element of caution around not running before we can walk and making sure we, we know what we're doing and tentatively taking those steps and that's that's what we did. We're never first to market with anything; I don't think that's a conscious decision. But we sometimes wait and see how things pan out before we will deploy certain technologies or certain new products or whatever. So we're never first to market, we let others make those mistakes. And we will, you know, we'll, we'll learn from those mistakes and hopefully follow and get it right. But we can often get it right first time, which is how we've succeeded even before all the automation, that that's just the kind of mantra that our business has always had.

Adam

I think that's quite common in the financial services market, in particular. It's something we saw a lot around the rise of cloud, it took a good few years into cloud computing's kind of maturity before financial services organisations were kind of ready to make that jump.

Paul

Definitely. No, absolutely. But in terms of, you know, our business is quite forward looking. We, we're not scared to make decisions where, where we need to, we always put our members first, but we do it in a, we try and do it in a smart and almost caring way that that looks after everything. So because of the nature of our business, we're not, our shareholders are our members, we are owned by our members. So they're first and centre, always in everything that we do, but our people, our members too, our employees are a part of our business. So I think if we weren't able to demonstrate that we were able to redeploy, and retrain and re, you know, reuse people, and still have the same opportunities for people, it might have been a slightly different story, because we, we wouldn't just, you know, chuck people out and be uncaring and un, you know, make those those kind of negative decisions on people. And our members certainly wouldn't want that either. So being able to deploy in the way we did, that was able to, it was probably the right time for us to do it, because we were the right size. And we were able to then grow without spending more and recruiting more. But at the same time, we were looking after the people that we had, whilst given opportunities to others, in kind of development roles and technology roles as well.

Zach

Has your use of Process Automation evolve beyond what you originally planned?

Paul

No, I don't think it has, I think we are certainly, I always had the vision to have a fully automated, fully unattended operation. I come from a financial services background. And there already was a lot of automation and a lot of, still a lot of manual tasks being done. But there was a lot of automation already in play within the industry that I worked in. So it was a bit of a culture shock when I, when I came to the credit union and saw some of the things that you know, were still being done, as if it was, you know, 1970s, 1980s. But there, but that's just the way of the world. That's that's, that's what happened. And it was a small business, a really small business back then. And so I always had a vision to take it forward and achieve what we've, what we've since achieved, because we've taken it further forward beyond the the lending side of things, that's the kind of first big one that we did, and that the best kind of use case to to explain the concept. So I always had the vision. However, I think it's I think we've deployed it, and we've developed those, or developed that process automation, in a different way from how I envisaged that that happening. The journey that we've been on over that period has certainly taken us a lot longer than it would have taken us if I had been in a in a bank or, you know, with the resources at my disposal, huge project teams and everything you have, although sometimes the governance around that slows, slows things down in getting decisions made. But and there's pros and cons with a small business. But no, I think the vision was always there. But we we've gone about it slightly differently from how I first thought we'd have started this.

Adam

How so?

Paul

Just the fact, I think the fact that we've done it ourselves. I envisaged going out to a partner company to build us a whole new back office and chuck everything out and replace it and you know, modernise the whole, the whole piece which is not how we've done it; it's much more fragmented and much more of an evolution rather than revolution. So we still have our VB6 application, we still use it for some things, but we're not relying on it anymore. It's still the centre of our business, the SQL database is still the centre. But we've gone out and bought third party applications like Laserfiche, that's then complimented everything we've got. So we've got a much more complicated kind of set of applications and much more complicated infrastructure now than we did have, because the VB6 application was a credit union in a box that was designed to plug and play and run a credit union business, but it wasn't externally facing, it wasn't able to talk to the outside world, and deal with self serve applications. Certainly, it's a dumb system. It's not designed for any kind of automation. So bolting everything around that and complementing it in a much more modular way, is how we've done it, which is not what I thought we would do, way back when we we started this. But then when you saw how easy it was to deploy the Laserfiche solution to put in play the process automation for for loans, when you start to complement that with Experian for credit decisioning, which again, was off the shelf plug and play, and has a UI that you can go in and design your credit risk strategy to say if a customer says this, then this is the route to take. If a customer says this, then this, you know, go down a different path in terms of credit risk strategy, which lets us automate the lending decisions, which lets us automate identity checking for customers as part of the onboarding application. We've also got an off the shelf package that enables us to interface with the BACS system for direct debit collection, which takes all the paper away from that and automates a lot of those processes, starting to sew those things together with our developers, and then integrate it into other interfaces that sit in front of our old back office application, integrate into our database, integrate into self serve applications, just joins all the dots up to give us quite a clever enterprise level platform. But it's not, you know, we've not bought it from a large enterprise level organisation; it's lots of little components that we've sewn together to make it work for us, which is much more cost effective probably. And lets us achieve kind of the bespoke solution that we need.

Zach

Has that modular approach that you mentioned made your IT easier to manage in a way?

Paul

Possibly. It's, it's not easier to manage, it was easier to manage when we didn't have any, way back at the start, because we engage with a number of outsource partners that look after our network, we're not large enough to have all the specialisms to run the network and the telephony and the cybersecurity and everything. So we've got a number of partners that we work with that give us those skill sets around around our business.

Adam

We love the partner community.

Paul

Yeah, and we've certainly retained that. And they're great because they're working with other bigger businesses than you and they can share experience and they can almost, they can sometimes signpost you to other other technologies and help you grow and help you, you know, they've got a lot of horizon scanning going on that just we wouldn't have as a business.

Adam

Yeah, exactly.

Paul

So that's critical to our success and where some of our ideas have come from and where some of our other partnerships have come from. But it's much more complicated now because we've we've got in house applications that we are supporting with our developers and our own IT team that's then engaging with those, those third party organisations and the partners. And so it's a hybrid approach that we have. So it's more complicated, but it's arguably better for the business. It'd be much easier if we just had one partner that looked after the, you know, the entire application, which is what it was 10, 15 years ago, with that credit union in a box, it just didn't really do much for the business and it wasn't fit for the business anymore. But if anything went wrong with it or you wanted to change it, you just put in a change request to that organisation, you paid for it. And it happened. Sometimes, you know, you'd be in a queue for something to happen, which is the negative aspect of that; if we want to make a change to our applications today, it's in our gift to do that. If it takes us ages, that's our fault. Because we're in control of our own destiny, you know, we're in control of our own, our change control process sets internally, we're not relying on on one external partner that's running our application. We can... it's much more controlled and with the process automation tools that we have, with the drag and drop stuff, if it's relatively low level changes, we can just log in into the workflow. Some of it's quite simplistic, there's there's no coding involved. It's almost looking like a Visio flowchart and you just go in and drag and drop, and process A then becomes stage three instead of stage one or whatever, or you change the location where it's to point to, or, you know, whatever you're trying to do - it's a lot more simpler than having to make a request to an external, go through a six month change process, get all signed off, get it queued, and everything you need to do before for that happens.

Zach

Could you remind us what year you implemented this technology?

Paul

We, the lending technology was put in in 2017. So, so yeah, we we made the decision in 2017 that we just couldn't maintain the manual nature of what we were doing anymore, and we'd got to a size where it was just not feasible to keep going down that path. And that's when we we embarked on that. So part of the successes, we've doubled our lending as part of it, and I think that's that was twofold. One, we were able to, so we had capacity restrictions on us that we knew we could only lend so much up until that point. And so we were able to, to double the new lending business pretty much overnight after we deployed that. But I also think the fact that we made we, removed the barriers to lending as part of as well. So it was cumbersome to take a loan from us. It was time consuming. You had to wait two weeks to get your money. So everything's instant these days, everybody wants everything now. You know, it's almost like adding Prime membership to our lending process that you can get it same-day. So that's that's what we delivered here. And I think that kind of USP, certainly a USP within the credit union sector, but even with some banks, you have to wait days for the process to come through. Some of them still insist on you sending payslips in, sending in bank statements or whatever. So we stripped all that back and digitised everything, which is a bit of a USP, and the customer journey was just made so slick as part of that. And I think that's helped us to, to achieve the growth.

Adam

So do you have any plans for further automation?

Paul

Yes, and one of the next projects we're looking at is to achieve the same level of automation across our mortgage business, so we we're one of the only credit unions that lend in the mortgage space. And we were a unique lender, because it's a high loan to value. So it tends to be for first time buyers that would be excluded from from the property ladder because they just don't have a deposit where we're one of the only lenders that do 100% mortgages, for example. And so it's quite a unique niche market that we're in for mortgages. And and many of you know that there's, in the UK, there's a requirement to take advice from a mortgage advisor when you when you apply for a mortgage. So you sometimes need half a day, a day off your work to go and sit in front of a mortgage advisor to get through the various questions and everything you need to do. But there's a lot of paper and a lot of, certainly for us, there's a lot of off-system processes and documentation and everything that needs to be completed. And I think there's an opportunity for us to improve that. So there'll still be there face to face - well, with COVID It's all done, it's not done face to face anymore. It's all, you know, teams calls and Skype calls, et cetera, that we have with our customers - but there'll still be that face to face element of speaking to someone to take the mortgage and get the advice and do everything you need to do. But all the documentation and the fulfilment of everything and pulling the survey together and all the underwriting and everything that goes with that, I think there's an opportunity to automate that and deploy similar technology that we've got. But for a different use case. To enable the customer to self serve to onboard them into the process. Drop in our face to face element and then use a process automation to to back that up with quite a slick fulfilment process.

Zach

You said you implemented this in 2017? Do you think that having process automation in place helped your business address any challenges that came about during the pandemic?

Paul

Yes, definitely. When the pandemic hit, we made the decision to close our office and allow everyone to work from home. And that wasn't a requirement. We were classed as essential services. So like banks and building societies, we could have remained open. But we had challenges with social distancing. We were never going to be able to achieve it in the size of office that we've got. So it was the right decision for us to close and everybody worked from home. We, because of the process automation and, and the almost paperless environment that we had created within the office as a result of this, we were able to continue to operate pretty much business as usual. And with no downtime we finished, in fact I think it was a Monday night. It was the night Boris made his announcement that, you know, what was going to happen in lockdown, the first lockdown was going to hit and everything. So it was that Monday night, we closed the office. And then we opened business as usual the next morning with everybody working from home with with a seamless transition and no interruption and no impact to customers. And I actually think the impact of the pandemic on us has been a positive one in terms of the technology because I think our customers have embraced technology much more now. Because they've had to, we had some members that just would not consider paperless, would not consider using the mobile app, still insist on coming to see us. But all of a sudden, we're not there to have face to face and you can't walk into our office and speak to someone the way you have done for the last 15 years. Because that just doesn't exist anymore because og COVID, because the world suddenly changed. So our customers were forced down the road of engaging with new technology. And that's been a positive step. And most of them have been quite complimentary about the technology. They're not scared of it anymore. And they almost needed that little push to to get them into it.

Adam

Well, I'm afraid that's all for this week's show. But thanks once again to Glasgow Credit Union CTO Paul McFarlane for joining us.

Zach

You can find links to everything we spoken about today in the show notes and even more on our website, itpro.co.uk

Adam

Don't forget to subscribe to our social media and YouTube channel for more great content and leave the podcast a rating and a review.

Zach

We'll be back next week with more analysis from the world of IT, but until then, goodbye.

Adam

Bye.

Automation has been a trend in business for decades, but with the advent of cloud-powered low-code no-code tools, the benefits are now within reach of even the smallest organisations. Businesses are increasingly making use of the tools to reduce their reliance on paper processes, speed up manual tasks through intelligent workflows, and extract more value from their data.

In this episode, we hear from Paul McFarlane, CTO of Glasgow Credit Union, to find out how deploying business automation tools within the company’s lending business allowed it to achieve significant growth without increasing headcount, as well as offering faster loan approvals, and navigating the disruptions of COVID-19.

Highlights

“The pain points we had with deploying the process automation was we were not an IT focused business, we were not technically literate as a business; we had systems that had been in place for a long time. And we didn't have the capacity, or indeed the resources at the time, to start developing and start, you know, building interfaces and APIs that would sit in front of our existing back office. So we looked externally, and had to look externally to various different platforms, platforms like Laserfiche and Experian and different things that we could bring in to achieve some of those process automations.”

“The timeline for us was about three months. So we probably could have done that a lot quicker, the three month timeline was because we had to build a lot of front end stuff. So there's a lot of bespoke front end application forms and different things that we built. The actual business process automation, and configuring the workflows is really simplistic, and that can be deployed quite quickly. I'd suggest a number of days. If you weren't putting customised front ends on it to enable self-serving different things for customers. So ours was quite bespoke, which is what took the time.”

“There's been significant benefits as part of the process automation. It has helped us grow, which was the overall objective, and we've grown without any increase in headcount. It's not a revolution for the business, it's been an evolution over a period of years. And our headcount has more or less remained static for 12 years, despite the fact we've grown from £50 million to £200 million. And so I think that's quite an achievement. And we've achieved that through process automation.”

Read the full transcript here.

Footnotes

• What is the paperless office?
• The IT Pro Podcast: Is it time to give up on the paperless office?
• How robotic automation is being applied to the workplace
• Almost three-quarters of businesses now use automation technologies
• Four business benefits of low-code
• Nurturing your business’ citizen developers
• The new generation of technologists

Subscribe

• Subscribe to The IT Pro Podcast on Apple Podcasts
• Subscribe to The IT Pro Podcast on Google Podcasts
• Subscribe to The IT Pro Podcast on Spotify
• Subscribe to the IT Pro newsletter
• Subscribe to IT Pro 20/20

Mac shipments grew at double the pace of overall PCs in 2021, according to figures from market research company Canalys.

In its PC analysis released today, the company charted a 28.3% growth in Mac shipments to 28.96 million units. General PC shipments, spanning desktops, grew at 14.6% in 2021 to reach just over 341 million worldwide.

The PC market overall was healthy, having shipped 90 million units in Q4 for the second consecutive year. Shipments for the year outpaced 2019 by 27%, and represented the highest annual total since 2012.

Notebooks and mobile workstations performed best, growing 16% in 2021 to 275 million units. Desktops still grew at a healthy 7% to reach 66 million units.

Apple's success is linked to a major upgrade across its Mac line after switching from Intel silicon to its home-grown ARM-based M-series architecture. The company has already released more advanced versions of its M1 chip and is expected to release the M2 chip this year.

Acer saw the next highest growth after Apple in 2021, at 21.8%, followed by Dell, which grew shipments 18%.

However, Lenovo topped the charts in absolute shipments, with a 24.1% market share representing 82.1 million units. HP followed in second place with a 21.7% market share, followed by Dell (17.4%). Apple had the fourth largest market share at 8.5% of the shipments, in spite of its impressive growth.

Canalys praised the industry for solid growth even as supply chain constraints continue to bite. The company noted increased penetration rates for PCs during the year, including young students and older family members. More people now own two PCs, it added.

The successes were not spread evenly across geographic regions, though. The US saw shipments fall for a second consecutive quarter in Q4, Canalys said, due to a strong fourth quarter for Chromebooks in 2020. EMEA and APAC were the bright spots, each growing shipments by double digits over last year.

WeSpire, a provider of employee experience solutions with an environmental, social, and governance (ESG) sustainability focus, has announced the launch of its Employee Carbon Management Solution.

Developed in partnership with Cox Enterprises and South Pole, the new solution provides enterprises with a comprehensive set of tools to measure, reduce, balance, and report on employee carbon emissions both on the job and at home.

“Until now, getting employee-based Scope 3 carbon emissions data quickly, accurately, and on-demand has been challenging due to a lack of workplace-specific tools to reliably capture and report the data,” explained WeSpire.

“The rapid move to hybrid and remote work environments and an increasing number of companies setting Scope 3 Net Zero goals has magnified the urgency of implementing a better approach.”

Employee Carbon Management Solution by WeSpire enables companies to establish a corporate ESG strategy across the workforce by providing employees with specific steps they can take to reduce their individual carbon footprints.

Through curated actions based on behavioral science, companies can promote continual, progressive reductions in carbon emissions without relying on offsets immediately.

WeSpire has also partnered with South Pole to provide high-quality offset opportunities as rewards to employees and employers.

WeSpire's Employee Carbon Management Solution will be available by Earth Day 2022 after it passes its testing phase.

“We’ve pioneered a data-first, behavior-change solution to drive much needed personal climate action in the workplace,” said Susan Hunt Stevens, founder and CEO of WeSpire.

“Our technology enables organizations to engage their employees to better understand their own impact, take targeted carbon reduction actions, and, when needed, the company or employees can balance what remains. This holistic solution will inspire further innovation as employees see their collective impact on their company’s ESG goals and will significantly simplify employee-related Scope 3 emissions reporting,” added Stevens.

MOV.AI has announced its Robotics Engine Platform in support of autonomous mobile robot (AMR) production.

The platform, which is designed to accelerate robot development, allows automation integrators and manual logistics vehicle manufacturers to build AMRs suitable for the most dynamic environments

According to Research and Markets, the AGV and AMR market will reach $13.2 billion by 2026 with an expected growth rate of 35%. With the rising demand comes increased pressure on logistics vehicle manufacturers and new players to develop AMRs that meet customers’ needs.

"Robot development is complex, and there are very few development tools to speed it up. ROS is great and constantly evolving, but it was built for robotics researchers that do not need to deal with enterprise needs such as quality, versioning or security," says Limor Schwietzer, CTO and founder of MOV.AI.

Schwietzer continued, "We built a platform that non-expert developers can use to pick and choose the functionality they need and easily configure it into their robot software. We also added all the tools needed for the important tasks of deployment and operation."

MOV.AI’s Robotics Engine Platform comes with an open plugin framework that allows developers to integrate MOV.AI with third-party algorithms and drivers quickly. A 3D physics simulator integrated into the MOV.AI IDE enables rapid robot software testing without physical robots.

Advanced autonomy algorithms, including 3D simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), enable localization accuracy of about 2 cm in 85% of dynamic environments. Additionally, built-in automated sensor calibration protects against vehicle degradation caused by sudden temperature changes, vibrations, or accidents.

Using scene editors, manufacturers can define operational layers, including zones, key points, and virtual paths for behavior planning and real-time decision-making.

"Until now, AMR manufacturers had to choose between long and expensive inhouse development and 3rd party black-box solutions with hardware limitations," says Motti Kushnir, MOV.AI CEO.

Kushnir added, "We are changing that. For the first time, companies have everything they need to easily build advanced robots that are simple to deploy and operate. By providing an end-to-end system that contains everything that is needed to create great robot software - whether it's integrating 3rd party hardware, selecting and integrating advanced autonomy algorithms, visual deployment and operation tools or integration with automation environments - MOV.AI frees manufacturers to focus on what makes them unique."

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This whitepaper reports the findings of an IDC survey of 14 organisations using OpenShift, revealing how their development teams have been empowered to pursue business goals with better digital products and services.

Download this report now to see how Red Hat OpenShift can:

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What makes a company agile?

IDC’s Robert Parker surveyed nearly 2,000 execs to uncover the core tenets of agility, finding low-code application development can contribute faster execution. In fact, 53% of highly agile companies had an excellent rating for time to market, leaving non-agile companies in the dust.

In today's accelerating digital economy, business agility has become an imperative, and in order to assess your organisation's own agile capabilities, you need to consider five dimensions:

• Leadership
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• Portfolio
• and Technology Architecture

Download this guide for best practices and go on to achieve superior financial results.

This week marks the 100th episode of the IT Pro Podcast, and to celebrate the occasion, we’ve got a special bumper episode where we’ll be looking back over the last 100 years of technological development. We examine the inventions that have led up to the present day, the impact that they’ve had, and how current innovations may impact the future. Join us as we discuss the birth of Silicon Valley, the world’s first internet service providers and the explosion of mobile technology, along with much more.

We’d also like to thank you for your continued support. We love bringing you these weekly podcasts, and we’re looking forward to the next hundred episodes.

Highlights

“When I think back to when I was in primary school, we had BBC Micros, and that kind of thing, which when you look at them aesthetically, they’re very similar to the IBM Personal Computer. So it is interesting how that filtered down. Now, at the same time as this was going on, the Xerox Star operating system was introduced, which is the birth of the graphical user interface, the GUI, and also the desktop metaphor. Lots of other things that we associate with modern computing: bitmap displays, networking, email capabilities, which is not bad in the 1980s considering there was no internet yet.”

“The big thing with the web was that it democratised information and access to information in a huge way. And without HTTP and HTML, in particular, making it comparatively easy to set up your own website with very minimal resources. Without that, the web as we know it would not exist, because it would only be for big companies and big organisations with the resources and the skills to create websites. And having this accessible open toolkit enabled anyone to start a website. And without that huge explosion in content, the web would not have been this all-consuming thing that everyone had to be on.”

“In the UK, in 2003, the first commercial 3G networks became available. This was the originator of the term mobile broadband. I'm sure that many of our listeners remember this as a big turning point in how we use mobile devices. Without it, we don't have smartphones, we don't have social media. We don't have what we're doing here now, speaking to each other virtually, because you don't have FaceTime, all these kinds of things. You can do whatever with it. And this 24 hour connectivity really is impossible without 3G, or would have been impossible without 3G.”

Read the full transcript here.

Footnotes

• The IT Pro Podcast: IR35 - what happens now?
• The IT Pro Podcast: What makes a Silicon Valley CEO? (Part Two)
• The IT Pro Podcast: What makes a Silicon Valley CEO? (Part One)
• What can the rest of the world learn from Silicon Valley?
• London Underground to get full 4G coverage by 2024
• EE becomes first UK telco to confirm 3G retirement plans
• Eight tips for reducing screen fatigue while working from home
• The IT Pro Podcast: Can 5G close the digital divide?
• The IT Pro Podcast: The teenager who started a networking firm
• Apple concedes ground to developers with $100 million settlement
• Six key events that helped Microsoft dominate the PC platform
• ARPANET’s first transmission is 50, but its influence is still felt today
• Tim Berners-Lee wants us to build a better World Wide Web

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• Subscribe to The IT Pro Podcast on Apple Podcasts
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FileCloud has announced its new cloud-agnostic, no-code automation tool: Workflow Automation.

Designed to improve organizational efficiency, the tool allows businesses to create automated yet intuitive workflows without coding. Use cases include document reviews, file requests, autoresponders, invoice approvals, and more.

“The next generation of enterprise productivity will be powered by a bottoms-up, employee-first approach and will require software that empowers workers to create, streamline and automate processes to reduce errors and drudgery,” said Madhan Kanagavel, founder and CEO of FileCloud.

Kanagavel added, “FileCloud's new Workflow Automation connects content, metadata and tasks together and allows incredible power and flexibility as well as a no-code approach to automating enterprise-wide business processes.”

An all-in-one solution, FileCloud’s Workflow Automation also features flexible infrastructure (self-hosted, hybrid, or cloud), a compliance center, and enterprise-grade file storage. An intuitive interface and drag-and-drop tools make workflow automation a breeze.

Additionally, the platform allows teams to create custom workflows to simplify high-volume tasks, minimizing human error and increasing productivity. An integrated dashboard presents every running workflow so users can monitor real-time progress.

Workflow Automation, which is integrated into FileCloud’s enterprise content management (ECM) platform, comes with a 14-day free trial. As for security, FileCloud meets GDPR, ITAR, and HIPAA compliance requirements. Organizations can scan uploaded files for viruses using any ICAP-compliant antivirus software, including McAfee.

“The move to digital processes and tools to improve efficiency and productivity is at the heart of any digital transformation. Processes such as contract reviews, file requests and invoice approvals can see tremendous returns on time and money once automated,” added FileCloud.

Legacy hardware-based load balancers don’t meet modern enterprise application delivery requirements in a multi-cloud environment.

You need a modern software multi-cloud load balancer which separates the data and control plane to deliver application services beyond traditional load balancing solutions. Services such as real-time application analytics, security and monitoring, predictive autoscaling of application traffic, hybrid and multi-cloud global server load balancing, and end-to-end automation.

Download this eBook and learn how to:

• Deliver consistent services across multi-cloud environments

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Self-driving company Aurora has released a beta version of its autonomous truck and passenger vehicle safety framework.

Aurora’s Safety Case Framework incorporates guidance from government agencies, best practices from safety-critical industries, voluntary industry standards, and consortiums. Most notably, the framework helps evaluate autonomous vehicles’ development, testing, and operation in public environments.

“The safety case-based approach is a defined way to evaluate when its vehicles are safe enough to operate on public roads and to assess that they are not creating an unreasonable risk to motor vehicle safety,” explained Aurora.

Aurora has based its framework on five safety principles: proficient, fail-safe, continuously improving, resilient, and trustworthy.

Aurora also uses its Safety Case Framework to continuously analyze and evaluate Aurora Driver's performance and development against internal standards. According to the company, the framework’s assessment offers organizations assurance for putting self-driving vehicles in use, with or without human operators.

The Aurora Safety Case Framework is also capable of assessing intentional misuse and abuse of autonomous vehicles.

“A Safety Case Framework is the most effective and efficient path to safely pulling the safety driver and it’s an imperative component for any company looking to operate without a safety driver and safely deliver commercial-ready self-driving vehicles at scale,” said Chris Urmson, CEO and co-founder of Aurora.

Urmson continued, “It’s something other self-driving companies should strongly consider using as they move towards commercialization.”

“Rather than being limited to just the vehicle, Aurora’s Safety Case Framework lays out the safety story for Aurora as a self-driving enterprise: the vehicle, people, processes, culture, and supporting programs and systems of the organization,” added Aurora.

Driverless cars have been “just around the corner” for more than a decade. We were supposed to take our hands off the wheel in 2020, according to car industry leaders Ford and Nissan – and yet here we are, still requiring driving licences.

Some progress has been made. Owners of Teslas can flip a switch to engage Autopilot mode, while Google’s Waymo is picking up taxi fares using cars without a human safety driver at the wheel; instead, engineers sit at the ready remotely to help the AI if it faces a situation it can’t figure out. Apple has plans to unveil its own driverless car in 2024.

Even so, car makers admit that progress hasn’t met their projections, while Waymo’s CEO John Krafcik has conceded that driverless tech would always have “some constraints”. The company said at the end of last year that it would offer entirely driverless rides in a select area of Phoenix, but these cars are remotely connected to engineers in case of challenges and some will still require safety drivers.

Perhaps, finally, the hype bubble has popped and reality has set in. “I think we’re starting to see a correction,” says Jack Stilgoe, associate professor at University College London and author of Who’s Driving Innovation? “The paradoxical thing is that the earlier a technology is, the more hype there is. The more work people actually do into the technology, the more they realise how hard it is to bring it into the real world.”

He adds: “Obviously, we shouldn’t listen only to what the companies say. They’re trying to sell stuff. But that isn’t to say that the technology won’t have enormous value in the years to come.”

Technical challenges

Creating a self-driving vehicle while AI is in its relatively early years is no easy task, and it remains likely that truly driverless technologies are years in the future. It’s already possible for cars to navigate streets using cameras for eyes, with a mix of other sensors to gather additional data, but the challenge is to ensure that the software can understand the images and data passed back to it by those sensors and make good decisions based on that information. For that, systems are trained in real-world scenarios – that is, they’re driven a lot – and also in simulations.

Driverless cars use three vision systems: Radar, cameras and LiDar. The latter stands for “light detection and ranging”, and works similarly to radar, bouncing pulses of light off objects to determine their size, shape and, if they’re moving, speed. The systems work best in combination, as each has its own weaknesses – radar, for example, doesn’t work as well in bad weather.

The AI-based interpretation can also be impacted by factors from precipitation to graffiti. For example, if you see a stop sign covered in spray paint, you understand that braking is still required; if snow covers lanes, you go slowly and follow the car ahead. To be safe and effective, AI systems need the same mental flexibility – but, to take just one example, Waymo’s cars have spent much of their time in the sunny states of Arizona and California. Following reports that the cars didn’t work well in heavy rain, Waymo sent a few down to Florida in 2019 for the wet season to help train them for driving in adverse conditions.

Another factor is road layouts. Trials are zooming ahead in the US, but the road networks in many American cities are simpler than in the UK, according to Camilla Fowler, head of automation at TRL. “The infrastructure we have actually adds a lot of complexity to the driving task,” she says.

How and why

If we can’t solve all problems through engineering, there are other possibilities. We can limit where the cars are used, cap their speeds, rework roads or pick and choose the elements of automation that do work. There’s more to driverless technology than waiting for engineers to work out the kinks of fully driverless cars: “The question is quite often posed in terms of ‘when we will see driverless cars?’,” says Stilgoe. “I think the real question is actually where and in what form.”

For example, some cars could be geofenced – limited in where they can travel, because the developers know that the system works well enough in a specific area. Or they could be limited to special lanes. “The technology could in some cases need dedicated infrastructure, whether that’s a dedicated lane or smart infrastructure like smart traffic lights,” Stilgoe adds. Researchers at Princeton University have developed radar reflectors to alert automated cars to the presence of pedestrians and cyclists on roads.

Another step that's already being worked on is permitting an element of driving automation on motorways, but not on roads that are shared with pedestrians and cyclists; “automated lane keeping systems” are set to be approved in the UK this year.

This iterative approach to automated features has already been emerging for some years with computer-aided parking and braking. “I don’t believe people understand that most cars actually already have a level of autonomy,” says Bani Anvari, research leader of the Intelligent Mobility Group at University College London. “We are just gradually increasing this.”

To help understand and manage this process, in 2014 the automotive standards body SAE International produced a classification system detailing six levels of vehicular autonomy. Level zero represents full driver control at all times, while level five would be a car that can drive itself anywhere and everywhere without human intervention. In the short term we can expect to live with cars that are partially automated (level two) or have conditional automation (level three), which means the driver may be asked to retake the wheel. And that’s fine: While lane-changing assistance and keeping a car creeping forward during a traffic jam may not be the stuff of sci-fi films, such features can reduce driver fatigue and exhaustion.

Some tech leaders believe that full autonomy isn’t far off. Back in 2015, Elon Musk declared that self-driving technology was "largely a solved problem", and has since claimed that software updates will make it possible for current Tesla cars to navigate roads wholly unaided. Indeed, beta testers already have access to a “full self-driving” mode – although in paperwork filed to the California Department of Motor Vehicles the company has admitted that this is actually level-two autonomy requiring human supervision.

TRL’s Fowler predicts that full automation will happen first in controlled circumstances where it’s actually useful, such as around campuses or down residential streets. “It depends on what society needs,” Fowler says. “What’s the impact going to be on people’s wellbeing, safety, network capacity? The benefits need to be realised in order for this tech to be realised, I think.”

Indeed, the point should be to solve specific problems, rather than developing new systems for their own sake. “I want governments to be clear on what they want to see from these technologies,” says Stilgoe. “If they reduce congestion, are sustainable, are safer than alternatives, if they benefit people who have previously lost out on mobility technologies – those things a city could be particularly keen on. Rather than just starting with technological possibilities, you start with what people need.”

Regulate the brains

The tech industry tends to lament regulation, but the concept of a driverless car demands a robust testing and approval process. After all, any “dumb” car currently on the road is required to undergo thorough testing before being allowed to be sold. Now that we’re cramming brains into vehicles, we need to test those brains.

Unfortunately, we’re only just figuring out how to assess algorithms and AI – and that’s before they’re put into machines at high speeds. So, Fowler points out, a key question is how we really know when driverless cars are safe “What does the manufacturer need to do to demonstrate that all the different use cases and scenarios have been considered that the vehicle could come across within its operational design domain?” he asks. “How do you validate, how do you approve?”

Building trust

From the industry’s point of view, the value of regulation and testing is not only to ensure safety, but to build trust. If these cars aren’t seen to be safe by the wider public, people will keep their own hands on the wheel. There have been a few driverless car accidents – notably two deaths in Teslas with Autopilot mode enabled and the death of Elaine Herzberg in a collision with an Uber car in Arizona – but so far such incidents haven’t set back research in this area (although Uber has now sold off its autonomous car research division).

What could prove a bigger hurdle is the hype itself, creating an unrealistic expectation that sets up the public for disappointment. “I find it worrying that people feel the technology can do more than it can,” says Fowler. “That misconception of what your vehicle is capable of, and not fully understanding the limitations, could be a potential issue.”

UCL’s Anvari agrees that the way forward is to set aside the hype and be honest about what’s going on. “If you have an autonomous minibus, if the people sitting within it don’t understand what this technology is observing and how it takes actions, they won’t gain trust,” she explains. “If they see that this technology can see what they see, and reacts the way they would react, it will help gain trust.”

“If the whole human side of things is not solved, the trust of users is not solved, you will not be successful in rolling out the technology.”

Innoviz Technologies has announced Whale Dynamic will equip its autonomous driving system with solid-state InnovizOne LiDAR sensors.

Whale Dynamic's autonomous driving (AD) platform identifies and interprets vehicles’ changing environments to provide intelligent driving suggestions. It’s equipped with drive-by-wire technology, making it an ideal plug-and-play solution for robo-taxi and autonomous delivery companies, among other full-stack autonomous service providers.

Per reports, the next-gen Whale Dynamic AD platform will feature low-power InnovizOne LiDARs in place of InnovizPro LiDAR used in the previous versions.

InnovizOne is a solid-state LiDAR sensor that can endure high temperatures and bright sunlight. Pairing the sensor with Innoviz's perception software provides unrivaled angular resolution in object detection, classification, and tracking.

InnovizOne stores and returns multiple reflections per pixel. This is of particular importance when a laser pulse simultaneously strikes multiple objects, such as rain droplets and snowflakes.

InnovizOne LiDARs can be integrated with Level 3, 4, and 5 autonomous vehicles. The sensors' detection range is 0.1 to 250 meters with 115° x 25° (H x V) maximum field of view. As for security, InnovizOne is ISO 9001:2015-certified and adheres to ISO 26262 safety regulations.

"We are excited to expand our technology collaboration with Whale Dynamic to bring Innoviz's advanced high-resolution solid-state LiDAR technology to their AD Platform," said Omer Keilaf, CEO and co-founder of Innoviz.

"We look forward to collaborating with Whale Dynamics to bring Innoviz's High-Performance LiDAR to L4 Platforms in China, the largest vehicle market in the world."

Whale Dynamic CEO and founder David Chang stated, "InnovizOne brings us more possibilities to create the world's best sensor fusion design and will also empower our perception algorithm to an unprecedented level. We are looking forward to working together to achieve the goal of building a fully autonomous vehicle capable of completing daily service tasks on public roads."

Velodyne Lidar has announced ANYbotics will equip its autonomous robots with Velodyne Puck Lidar sensors.

Designed for dexterity, ANYbotics’ four-legged robot ANYmal autonomously navigates uneven industrial terrains. Its built-in depth sensors perceive obstacles in confined and open spaces. Additionally, ANYmal's inspection payload provides visual, thermal, and acoustic insights for machinery and infrastructure performance monitoring.

Puck Lidar sensors by Velodyne offer a real-time 3D perception of data for object tracking, mapping, and classification. With high-resolution image data and a wide vertical field of view, the sensors can detect the shape and movement of objects with low reflectivity, regardless of their composition.

ANYbotics will include Puck Lidar sensors in its robotic inspection module to help ANYmal map industrial environments, detect obstacles, and avoid potential collisions. The arrangement is of particular importance in low-light or rugged environments.

“Velodyne’s lidar sensors provide ANYmal with a constant stream of high-resolution, 3D information about its surroundings, helping the robot safely map and patrol complex and harsh environments,” said Daniel Lopez Madrid, team lead of perception at ANYbotics.

“The sensors enable precise localization and mapping capabilities our robots need to understand the physical environment they are operating in and any changes such as moving people and objects.”

Velodyne Lidar executive director Erich Smidt added, “ANYbotics robotic solutions excel at automating industrial inspections that provide plant operators information to maximize equipment uptime and improve safety. By using Velodyne’s lidar, their robots can autonomously navigate complex multi-story environments and find the quickest route to perform missions. During operation, the robot’s system can safely avoid obstacles and reliably move over rough terrain.”

The worldwide medical telepresence robots market is expected to increase to $159.5 million by 2028, according to a new analyst report.

Published by Grand View Research, the report said the market is projected to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 18.5% from 2021 to 2028. The growing adoption of telepresence robots in the health care sector and product innovations catering to the increasing demand have contributed to this growth.

The report also said that with an increasingly elderly population with chronic illnesses requiring regular monitoring, demand for such robots in home situations will only grow.

The telepresence robot market experienced solid growth during the COVID-19 pandemic because of increasing deployments of such devices in hospitals worldwide.

The report cited one example in the Yatharth Hospital in Noida, which deployed Mitra robots to help health care providers deliver care with telepresence technology.

In another example, the Providence Regional Medical Center in Everett, Washington used the InTouch Health Robot Vici to aid the virtual presence and communication between doctors and patients.

The report added that features enabling two-way communication and connecting from any location to monitor patients remotely further boost the demand for medical telepresence robots.

The report said several companies are breaking into the market, offering technologically advanced robots, introducing new features catering to the current demand, and bolstering R&D efforts. These factors also boost the adoption of medical telepresence robots.

The report added that most governments worldwide were taking initiatives to support artificial intelligence and robotics, attracting new entrants to enter the market.

In 2020, North America dominated the market with a revenue share of over 40%, thanks to the higher adoption of artificial intelligence and robotics in the health care sector and the increasing number of players in the region. In addition, the rise in disposable income, the growing geriatric population, and the increasing prevalence of chronic illnesses are expected to support the demand for medical telepresence robots.

The report found that last year, hospitals and assisted living facilities held the largest share of the medical telepresence robots market at over 70%. However, the home use telepresence robot segment is set to increase at the highest CAGR of 19.5% over the forecast period due to the increase in the geriatric population, rise in the number of patients with chronic illnesses needing regular monitoring, and the availability of some affordable telepresence robots in the market.

Mobile robots dominated the market with a revenue share of over 65% in 2020 and are expected to witness the fastest growth over the forecast period.

Analysts said this growth was because of features such as autonomous navigation, adjustable height, head motion, and obstacle avoidance that enable smooth and efficient delivery of services and virtual monitoring, thereby facilitating effective teleconsultation.

Kanglim has announced it’s partnering with Ridecell to build an IoT-enabled mobility platform for industrial vehicles.

A global manufacturer and supplier of heavy-duty vehicles, Kanglim produces telescopic cranes, fire-fighting trucks, and road sweepers, among other special-purpose vehicles and instruments.

By partnering with Ridecell, Konglim aims to achieve "unparalleled utilization and uptime" for its fleet of connected vehicles. Under their new agreement, Kanglim's specialty industrial vehicles will be equipped with Ridecell's Fleet IoT Automation technology.

"Specialty vehicles are often delivering essential services, such as electricity repair, military or fire containment," said Dr. Seuk-Kyung Sung, vice chairman and CEO of Kanglim.

"Automating maintenance requirements to minimize downtime is mission critical. Our digital network and the Ridecell automation and mobility platform lets our customers maximize their investment in Kanglim vehicles and keep essential infrastructure running."

Ridecell’s cloud-based automation platform is purpose-built for fleets and helps businesses create custom workflows that automatically detect and diagnose vehicle issues. These issues include placing vehicles in and out of maintenance service, issuing digital keys to drivers and staff, generating insights from fleet monitoring systems, and more.

For an added layer security, Ridecell’s remote immobilization system protects vehicles from unauthorized access.

“The result is a self-acting fleet control system that doesn’t just report issues but automatically resolves issues quickly and efficiently, from start to finish,” explains Ridecell.

Ridecell has also welcomed Kanglim to its investor community.

"Kanglim and Ridecell share a similar vision of a future where fleets composed of industrial specialty vehicles are achieving unparalleled utilization and uptime," said Aarjav Trivedi, founder and CEO of Ridecell.

"Our tailored automation and mobility platform provides built-in connectivity and out-of-the-box efficiency that keeps Kanglim's vital fleet on the road. Digital transformation for specialty vehicles is the perfect use for the Ridecell Fleet IoT automation and mobility platform, and we look forward to working with Kanglim.”

Amidst the disruption of lockdowns, many organisations have uncovered great benefits to ‘new normal’ ways of working. As a result, organisations are incorporating flexibility and agility into their long-term working strategies.

But how do you take everyone’s preferences into account while continuing to operate smoothly? And what are the business benefits?

This whitepaper looks at the importance of focussing on your employees when rebuilding your working setup, and how the right technology and business solutions can empower staff to work effectively under a new arrangement.

Half of UK businesses expect to reduce the size of their office space, with a third looking to cut it down by 30%, according to a new report.

PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) surveyed 258 C-Suite executives and over senior employees of the UK's largest companies and their proposed cuts roughly equated to nine million square feet of space.

The finding indicates an appetite for 'hybrid work' models in the UK, where employees mix remote and in-office shifts, with around 71% of the respondents planning to increase investment in technology to enable more agile work models over the next two years.

As such, only 10% of those surveyed agreed that the level of employees working in the office will match that of pre-pandemic levels, despite taking into account the speed of the vaccine roll out. The consensus from the survey among the senior executives is that staff will continue working remotely for two or three days a week.

"The figures couldn't be more clear, the shift to hybrid working, with part of your time at home and part in the office, is pretty much embedded into the working culture of many organisations," said Angus Johnson, the UK real estate leader for PwC UK. "So much so that a significant proportion of the businesses we spoke to are planning to reduce their office portfolio, which could lead to up to nine million square feet of vacant space.

"However, it's clear that the role of the office is not going to disappear. We may see an increased demand for flexible space as many businesses' operating models may well need that option if holding dead space is to be avoided. It's also clear that the nature and purpose of office space are going to change."

Many of the respondents are said to be implementing 'subleasing' models and exploring partnerships for shared office space. What's more, 51% of the organisations with 100 employees or more already have a workplace strategy that considers the long-term impact of COVID.

There are plenty of reasons for organisations to be reconsidering their working practices. Thanks to ubiquitous connectivity, remote working has proved viable, and many employers have realised that the working world we build going forward doesn't need to be so rigid and can be designed to suit both employers and their employees.

Whether it's a key organisational objective or an added bonus, there can be environmental benefits to flexible, dynamic working, especially if organisations are careful to consciously factor sustainability into their reorganisation plans. Given the ambitious goals of the Paris Agreement and the UK's target of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, sustainability has been a huge topic over the last few years and the business world is now taking it more seriously than ever. Customers and employees are also increasingly interested in what the companies they buy from and work for are doing to protect the planet, and there are commercial benefits to going green too.

Proof of the impact we can all have by changing our daily routines, including working practices, came during the strictest periods of global lockdown in early 2020, where daily global carbon emissions fell by up to 17%. While this dramatic reduction happened in a time of intense restrictions, it highlights the tangible difference we can make by living and working and differently. Changes such as reduced city commute as part of a dynamic working culture can enable organisations to become more sustainable and help build a better future, especially if organisations invest in making their new IT infrastructure as green as possible.

The benefits of staying put and "virtual" travel

One of the biggest environmental benefits of remote working practices is the reduction of travel. Transport accounts for around a quarter of global CO2 emissions, and the daily commute alone is a significant contributor to our carbon emissions as a country. The 2020 O2 Business Flexible Future of Work report found that if full-time workers worked one day less at the office, each person would travel 1526 fewer miles on average, which would result in an annual 7.1 megatonne decrease in CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalent) emissions. If UK workers took it even further and worked from home twice a week, the UK would see an annual CO2e decrease equivalent to more than the total emissions of Northern Ireland.

Another consequence of the recent lockdowns was to bring about an almost complete stop to international business travel. Many organisations are now waking up to the fact that this kind of travel simply isn't always necessary. While occasionally getting everyone together in the same location might be deemed crucial for building and maintaining some relationships, video conferencing technology or even emails and cloud collaboration are good enough for day-to-day communication. This has the potential to make a huge difference to the planet. According to German nonprofit Atmosfair, a return flight from London to New York generates around 986kg of CO2 per passenger. To put that in context, there are 56 countries in the world where the average person's total annual CO2 emissions are lower than this.

There are other potential benefits to staying put and working at home at least some of the time. Reducing office space could help lower energy consumption, especially in the summer months when offices are running energy-guzzling air conditioning systems. Food waste and single-use plastics could also be reduced by employees eating at home, and the volume of printing is likely to be reduced when employees don't have the convenience of printing at the office.

Sustainability is good for business

Being environmentally aware will be important to many of your employees too. According to the O2 Business 2020 Flexible Future of Work report, scrapping the daily commute is a popular move with younger, environmentally conscious employees. 51% of Gen Z and 53% of Gen Y surveyed said they were concerned about the environmental impact of commuting. 39% of workers surveyed wanted to take fewer business trips to help protect the environment. In an increasingly competitive environment, listening to your employees is vital to retain and attract the best talent.

There are also financial benefits to taking measures to become more green and efficient. O2 has also created a Green Savings Calculator, which helps organisations work out how they can use flexible working to reduce their carbon footprint and save money. The calculator focuses on different areas of saving across each business, including travel reduction and long-term strategies such as office rationalisation.

According to early trials of the calculator, UK businesses with 1,000 employees could save an average 534 tonnes of CO2 per year, and £2.6m in energy, office rationalisation and travel-related costs. This is based on employees working from home two days a week, going on an average of two business trips a month, and not taking any international trips.

Building a green infrastructure

Of course, just because your employees aren't physically travelling around as much, doesn't mean you're off the hook when it comes to carbon emissions. Your digital activity still has a footprint. According to 2018 figures from think tank The Shift Project, the carbon footprint of our devices, the internet and the infrastructure supporting it all account for about 3.7% of global emissions. So it's important to carefully consider the environmental impact of your digital systems.

One way to do this is to go with providers who take environmental concerns seriously. For example, O2 is committed to building a greener network, with a goal of becoming the first UK mobile network to reach net zero by 2025. It is also aiming to cut emissions by 30% across its whole supply chain. O2 was also the first mobile network in the world to be awarded the Carbon Trust Triple Standard for carbon, waste and water and is currently one of only three companies in the world to hold the highest level Carbon Trust Standard for supply chain.

Through its business connectivity solutions, O2 is also on a mission to help its customers reduce their impact and build a greener future. Partnering with the UK Government's ambitious Smart Metering initiative, O2 is using its IoT connectivity and infrastructure to help deliver smart metering solutions across the country – which will help further reduce the environmental impact of those working at home.

Flexibility has benefits for so many aspects of your organisation, and it can be a step towards a more environmentally conscious working model. Build a better future for your organisation, your employees and the planet with new working practices.

Find out more about how O2 can help you build a flexible workplace

A diverse workforce is not just important in terms of inclusion, it can be hugely beneficial to an organisation – widening the talent pool and bringing in different perspectives and experiences into the business, which can help boost creativity and innovation. According to 2020 research by Gartner, organisations that actively employ people with disabilities reported 89% higher retention rates, a 72% increase in employee productivity and a 29% increase in profitability.

However, the 9–5 office isn't set up to enable everyone to succeed, and your organisation might be missing out on proper representation of the communities you serve, and the opportunities diversity and inclusivity can provide to the products and services you are delivering today. Traditional working life can have the tendency to exclude or alienate certain groups – those with responsibilities that prevent them from working fixed hours, those who live in locations outside of commutable distance, or those who have physical or cognitive disabilities that can make working in an office a challenge.

This can lead to companies leaning towards hiring those who can fit into their rigid structure and expectations. Even when these groups are included, the traditional office environment that many are used to can be unnecessarily challenging and prevent employees from working at their best. With modern technology, there's no need to enforce such rigid working practices. In fact, all people could benefit from and feel more included by a 'dynamic' setup, which is both flexible in terms of hours and locations.

The benefits of a dynamic setup

One of the biggest benefits of remote working for employers is that it can widen the talent pool. Whereas your staff once needed to live within commutable distance of the central office, if a job can truly be done from any location, then it shouldn't matter if they live on the other side of the country. This also allows organisations to hang onto their valued current employees too. Where an employee may have left the company because they were moving out of an area, now they may be able to continue their job remotely with technology such as portable devices and cloud connectivity.

Even if potential or current employees do live nearby, working in an office can be extremely challenging for some. Those with physical disabilities may find it difficult to get to and around an office. Similarly, those who are neurodivergent may find an office environment stressful or overwhelming. The option to work remotely and flexibly can be transformative for these groups and enable them to perform jobs they would otherwise be excluded from or find difficult. Those who are time poor and have other conflicting responsibilities, such as working parents or carers, may find that flexibility brings a lot of benefits, allowing them a great work-life balance and increasing productivity and job satisfaction – both of which are mutually beneficial to their employer for talent retention and output.

Robin Christopherson (MBE), Head of Digital Inclusion for AbilityNet explains: "Disabled employees have long been calling for more flexibility in their working patterns that, when accommodated, help them perform at their best. Broadening that out to every worker – letting them choose when, where and how they work – helps every employee feel less stressed and better able to meet the demands of a tricky work-life juggle. As a blind person, I don't need breaks to rest or manage pain, but I'd nevertheless take a Zoom call over a trip to London for that client meeting any day of the week. I then have time for four more meetings that day – plus two walks for the guide dog, of course. With or without COVID, hybrid means choice and choice works for everyone at work."

As well as those who cannot work a traditional 9–5 office-based job, there are those who have found benefits from remote working, such as better work-life balance and reduced travel costs, and simply don't want to return to the office full time. Recent research by O2 into working styles and preferences found a huge variation in preferences. Out of this came three different types of worker – "Office Cravers", "Mixers" and "Home Dwellers".

"Office Cravers" tended to be either those in senior positions with a preference for in-person collaboration or those at the beginning of their careers looking to build social and professional relationships in the office. Many "Mixers" missed the social aspect of the office but also appreciate home working for spending more time with family and friends. This group also included those who felt more productive with the option to work from different locations. "Home Dwellers" with a preference for full-time remote working were either those who preferred working alone and having more time for their interests or had responsibilities that were easier to manage with a home setup. To accommodate all of these preferences, a Device as a Service (DaaS) solution could help – offering the latest technology to the end user. With O2's DaaS offering, for example, devices can be sent individually to the employee's home address, already set up and ready to go.

Ensuring your dynamic setup is truly inclusive

When building a dynamic workplace, it's vital that no one gets sidelined, which can happen if flexible policies exist but aren't well managed and applied. Hiring employees who work in a different geographical location and therefore must join meetings remotely is great until the technology isn't up to scratch and they can't fully participate. While you may feel like you're championing inclusivity by providing the tools and resources for a working parent to work flexible hours, if crucial meetings are scheduled outside of their hours then they may feel alienated. A lingering culture of presenteeism will also cause issues. Even with a flexible policy, if there are noticeable advantages for those working in more traditional ways, then flexible workers will soon feel isolated or pressured to conform.

To mitigate these risks, organisations should prioritise high-quality flexible technology solutions for employees such as connectivity packages, cloud video conferencing and collaboration tools and portable devices – and ensure that managers are trained on the challenges of managing and developing teams that are both dispersed and working different hours. Networking, socialising and mentorship are all still vital, but organisations need to find ways of making them equally accessible to those not physically present, through digital workplace solutions. Organisations need to really get to know their employees and their needs, and work out how they can build an ecosystem that supports them – for example by investing in collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams. You may want to enlist expert help for this. For example, O2 Business can help you to understand your workforce, identify the best technology solutions for their needs, and deploy those services effectively.

Flexibility doesn't mean you need to create a bespoke solution for each employee. It means creating a system with the technical and personal support to empower employees to work wherever and however suits them and the organisation best. Organisations should recognise that there is no one-size-fits-all solution, and therefore provide equal access to flexible tools and technology so that employees are supported to deliver what's needed within their role, when and wherever they work best.

By normalising dynamic working from the top down, and providing your employees with the right tools to perform their roles however and wherever suits them best, you can help everyone feel included and work at their full potential. In turn, a diverse and empowered workforce will help your organisation thrive.

Find out more about how O2 can help you build a flexible workplace

In this week's exclusive feature for The Business Briefing readers, Bobby Hellard looks at the steps beyond pay rises that business leaders can take to make employees feel valued.

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